Getting Things Done, in one outline
You do not have a to-do problem. You have a place problem: thirty open loops in your head and no single place they all live. That is the whole diagnosis behind Getting Things Done, and it is why the method still works after twenty-five years while the apps around it keep changing.
GTD is five moves. Capture everything into one inbox. Clarify what each thing is. Organize it where it belongs. Reflect weekly. Engage with one next action. Simple, and famously hard to keep running, because most setups die at the same two steps.
Capture dies when the inbox is not where your hands are. Reflect dies when the weekly review means touring six lists in five screens. After the third week, nobody tours.
The whole method is one tree
That picture is the entire system. Five branches. A project is a bullet with children. A next action is its first child with a checkbox. Done is a tick on the same line. There is no second app to sync, because a task and a note were never two different things.
Why the two death points stop dying
Capture becomes one keystroke. The Inbox is a bullet, so it is always at the top, and it has an email address: forward anything to it. A thought on the phone is the share sheet. A thought mid-writing is one Enter. The rule in GTD is that capture must be cheaper than remembering, and this is the first setup where that is literally true.
The review becomes one walk. Open Projects: does every project have one real next action? Chase what went quiet under Waiting for. Promote one Someday item, or none. The checklist for the review lives inside the tree it reviews, as checkboxes, like everything else. Ten minutes, one screen. You can see it half-done in the picture above.
Today builds itself. Put a date on a bullet and it stands on that day. No morning ritual of copying tasks into a Today app.
The part no to-do app can follow
Your agent works the same tree. An agent that reads your Inbox at 3 a.m. can clarify for you: sort captures under their projects, draft the next actions, and leave them for your Friday review like any other filing. GTD always assumed the clarifying brain must be yours. It no longer has to be.
Take the tree
Open the GTD template, press "Show in my Pando", and the five branches stand in your own outline, examples and review checklist included. Delete the examples, keep the walls.