When I started with GTD, I had no idea why I was on this planet

I ended up with GTD because I was drowning in work. Not because I wanted to know why I was put on this planet. Back then I had never given that question a thought. That is exactly where several other productivity methods lost me: you open the book, and before anything practical happens, you are supposed to work out what you are here for. After that it is about how to get there. At that point I had an inbox that had long since got away from me, and no idea what came first on Monday.

It is the same for most people who start out. And yet the idea persists that you have to sort out the upper levels first. Anyone who has not sorted them feels unfinished, and so leaves them alone entirely.

The GTD horizons of focus aren’t a build order, they’re a checking order

The image that does the damage is the pyramid. At the bottom, the level you are standing on: next actions, calendar, the day you are in. Above it five horizons, from projects up through areas of responsibility and goals to your vision and the question of what all of this is ultimately about. It gets drawn from the top down, and that is exactly how it gets read: as the order in which you build the thing.

It isn’t a build order. It’s a checking order. At heart, the horizons above your projects ask a single question: is what you are doing right now going in the direction you want to go? A checking question needs something to check. If nothing is running down below, you are checking fog.

There are exceptions. A colleague once had a client, a priest, who turned up with a thick book of handwritten notes: everything he had in mind for himself and his parish, spelled out over years. For him, starting at the top made sense, because there was already something up there.

This is where I would argue against the convenient explanation. The reason to start at the bottom isn’t that most people have no vision written out. The reason is that every decision you make at the top has to arrive at the bottom, or nothing comes of it. Even the priest with the full book needs a working list. Otherwise his vision stays exactly that: a full book.

Four rounds of why, from the front door to your vision

The way up is shorter than most people think. You don’t need an away day and you don’t need three weeks in a monastery. You need an existing list and one question: why.

Take an item that has been staring at you for a while and ask it that question four times in a row. A chain like that might look like this.

Horizon	The question it answers	Answer in the example
Next action	What am I actually doing?	Paint the front door
Project	What outcome do I want?	Living in a nice house
Area	Which part of my life does this belong to?	Home
Goal	What should be different there in a few years?	A house that barely needs any work
Vision	What is this a part of?	A home in old age I can rely on

Anyone looking closely at the method will spot a problem in the second row straight away. Living in a nice house isn’t a project. It never gets a tick, it’s a state.

That is precisely where the value of the exercise lies. For a great many tasks, the first why doesn’t land on a project at all, it lands straight on an area. That is not a glitch, it is a finding: the task is not attached to an outcome, it is attached to a standard you hold for that part of your life. For the odd task, that is perfectly fine. But if half your list looks like this, you are working on states instead of outcomes, and that is why the list never feels any shorter.

The one horizon where nothing ever gets ticked off

Paul Martin asked me the best question about this picture I know of: why do goals sit above areas of responsibility, when the areas are the space in which those goals happen in the first place? Shouldn’t the two levels swap places?

The honest answer about the order is: because that is how the method defines it. The better answer is that the question exposes a flaw in the picture. An area isn’t a floor at all, it’s a column. Draw the areas as vertical lines running through the whole pyramid and it works again: family, health, work and finances each have their own next actions, their own projects, their own goals and their own share of your vision.

A practical difference hangs on this. An area is the one horizon where nothing ever gets ticked off. A next action gets done at some point, a project gets completed, a goal gets reached. An area is a part of your life where you want to hold a standard, and that is never finished. Which means the question is a different one. With a goal you ask whether you will reach it. With an area you ask whether something is running here right now that matters to you.

Coaching has the wheel of life for this: a circle divided into areas of life, each segment coloured in according to how full it currently feels. At the end you look at a wheel that isn’t one, it’s jagged. If you sort your projects and goals by area, you get the same information without the coloured pencils, because area by area you can see where nothing has happened for months.

An empty area isn’t an accusation. I regularly have areas where nothing at all is running for a while. That is a decision, not a gap. The only difference is that I make it deliberately once a quarter.

Thinking upwards means changing something down below

The why chain is half the work. The other half is the way back down.

Years ago my friends complained that they never heard from me. They were right, I was bad at it. Today the same people ask me how I actually manage to stay in touch with everybody. The solution is unspectacular: every weekly review carries the question of who I have not heard from the longest, and that person lands on my calls list. An area that matters to me has been translated into a recurring question that spits out a concrete name every week.

That is the test for every half hour you spend up at the top. If afterwards no project has appeared, none has been struck off and no recurring question has been added, it was pleasant reflection and nothing more.

And the results need somewhere to live. If areas and goals sit in a document of their own that you open twice a year, they do not exist in your system. They belong where your review is looking anyway, right next to the projects. Otherwise the urgent wins every time.

The quarterly review is shorter than the weekly review, not longer

The weekly review asks whether your system still matches your reality. You go through the context lists, you go through the projects, and for each one you check whether a next action is captured. The quarterly review asks the reverse: whether your reality still matches your goals.

That is why it takes less time. I do not look at a single next action in it, only at projects, goals and areas, and for each area I ask myself whether what matters to me is actually running, or whether I am just pushing tasks along. My weekly review has a fixed slot on Friday. The quarterly review is a recurring task every three months, and it is allowed to sit for a week until I am at home and have some quiet. With that one I deliberately ease off on the discipline, because it does not take well to the wrong surroundings.

Where this typically goes wrong

• The horizons live outside the system. Areas and goals in a separate note, on a whiteboard or in a presentation. The review never looks there, so nothing ever happens there.
• Thinking at the top, changing nothing at the bottom. After the why chain, no new project appears and none is struck off. Then the exercise was a feeling, not a result.
• The quarterly review gets planned like a big weekly review. If you block half a day for it, you will never find the time. Count on a fraction of that, because you are leaving out an entire level.
• All the areas at once. That turns the exercise into a project, and the project migrates to Someday/Maybe. Take on one area, no more.
• An empty area gets read as failure. An area with no running project only becomes a problem when you have not deliberately left it empty.

Common questions

Do I have to build the GTD horizons of focus from the top down?

No, for most people the workable route is from the bottom up. The level of next actions and projects already exists, and the horizons above it are checking questions that need something to check. Starting at the top is only worth it if there is already material written out up there.

What is the difference between an area of responsibility and a goal?

An area of responsibility is the space in which something happens, a goal is an outcome inside it. The area of family is not a goal, it is never reached and never ticked off, it describes a standard you want to hold. A goal within that area, by contrast, has a recognisable state that tells you you have arrived.

How long does it take to think one area of responsibility through?

Give yourself half an hour per area and take on only one. Many people put off the work on the upper horizons for years because they expect it to take a multi-day retreat. After half an hour you usually know whether something that matters to you is running in that part of your life.

How does the quarterly review differ from the weekly review?

The weekly review reconciles your system with your reality, the quarterly review reconciles your reality with your goals. In the weekly review you go all the way down to the level of next actions, in the quarterly review you only look at projects, goals and areas. That makes the quarterly review the shorter of the two.

What do I do with a task that has no answer to the why question?

Then it has no place in your system, and that is a useful result. Either you strike it out, or it belongs on the Someday/Maybe list, because it is a wish and not a commitment. Either one is better than dragging it along between real commitments for another few months.

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Take on a single area this weekend, ideally one of the quiet ones: friends, personal development, home. Half an hour, a sheet of paper, four rounds of why. If a new project is standing there at the end, or an old one is crossed out, then the horizon has changed something at the bottom, and that is exactly what it is for.

The upper horizons rarely fail for lack of thinking. They fail because areas and goals have no place in the system where the review would ever find them. That is exactly what I set up as part of the Workflow Setup, from the context lists to the levels above them. Write to me if your system runs cleanly at the bottom and nothing is connected at the top.