#GTD26 — the process

Input defaults straight into In, no sorting in the moment. Exception: if it can't wait for a check-in, don't park it — do it, drop it at the top of Next/Pro, or give it a real due date. Ideas to build go in maybe instead.

Titles — @context Projet — action, single line; Projet — only if it's a multi-step project.

Every item you touch is do / divide / block. Do it now if it's ~2 min; write the next physical action if not; name the blocker and move to W4 with a re-check date if you're stuck on someone else. Never check off a project step without writing the next one.

A date means the world enforces it. Nothing else gets one.

Every task moves through the same small set of states. Solid arrows are the common path; the small note inside a box is its rarer exit.

In	Everything arriving, untriaged. The only list you add to without thinking. Never worked from — you don't pick your next task out of it. Emptied to zero weekly; skimmed same-day for what's new.
Next	Ordered, undated next actions. Every line is a physical action startable right now given time and place. Order is the priority — top is next. Never a project title, never a date.
Pro	Same shape as Next, the transition track. Never merged in — pro work is deep-work-shaped, personal is interruption-shaped, and merging the queues means the short shape always wins.
W4	Waiting on someone/something. Names the person or event, plus a re-check date. Renewals and expiries live here too, as ticklers. The moment a W4 item becomes something you do, it moves to Next.
Someday	Explicitly not now. Personal deferrals, never dated, never a source of guilt. Reviewed monthly, deleted freely.
maybe	The build-idea inbox, not a someday list. Items are supposed to age — never pruned for hygiene, never bulk-deleted. Feeds the brain via /brainfeed.

Rule 1 — a date is a promise the world enforces. Allowed only when something outside your head enforces it: an appointment, a legal or administrative deadline, an expiry, a renewal, another person waiting on a named day. "I'd like to do this Tuesday" is not a date. Everything else is undated and lives in an ordered list.

Rule 2 — two horizons, and only two. The hard landscape is the calendar plus dated tasks — small, real, enforced by Rule 1. The Next list is ordered and undated — the thing to pull from when time opens up. Order is the only priority signal; no flags, no star ratings, no dates-as-priority. Anything that's neither is Someday or dead.

Rule 3 — do / divide / block. Every item that reaches the front of the queue exits in exactly one of three states: Do it (already done by the time the question is asked, if it's ~2 minutes); Divide — write the next physical action, not a plan; Block — name the blocker and the person or event it depends on, then move to W4 with a re-check date. Nothing exits as "still sitting there."

Rule 4 — don't build the tree, point at the next action. Model a project as a title plus one next action — a one-deep pointer, not a hierarchy. When an action completes, write the next one. A real breakdown, if it's needed, goes in the notes field as plain text — free to edit, never structure to maintain. Never check off a project step without writing the next one — that's the forcing function, and the moment of completion is the best moment to write it, while the context is still in your head.

Rule 5 — contexts as @ prefixes. Agendas — @D @L @T — things to raise with that person next time you see them (distinct from W4, which is what they owe you). Situations — @buy @call @mac @home @vite. Keep the set under ~8. Legacy D.-style prefixes are parsed too, never migrated — they convert as tasks are touched at the weekly review.

Daily (~2–4 min, phone). Morning: check the hard landscape, then pick 1–3 items from the top of Next, plus one from Pro — that's the day's commitment. During the day: capture freely into In, no sorting required. Evening: skim only what's new in In since morning — do/divide/block just those, not the backlog — plus the two standing questions on anything already in flight: did anything become blocked, did anything need dividing. No daily re-prioritization, no re-dating, no list grooming — that's weekly work.

Weekly (20–30 min, Mac). In order: 1. In to zero — the rest of the week's captures. 2. Do/divide/block every open item in Next/Pro/W4, exhaustively. 3. Strip wish-dates — any past-due item that isn't genuinely enforced loses its date and rejoins Next, or dies. 4. Reorder Next for the coming week. 5. File back into the brain anything durable that surfaced.

The app runs the weekly review as a sequence, not as four tabs and a decision about where to start: the five steps above, one at a time, with a banner carrying the step and what is left in it. It is resumable — 20 to 30 minutes is longer than a phone stays awake, and a review that has to restart from step 1 is a review that doesn't get finished.

Monthly. An amnesty pass on Someday only — delete aggressively, no justification required. Never on maybe: its items are supposed to age.

Four numbers, on the Now screen, reset every midnight. They exist to make a good day visible — the system is otherwise all backlog, and a backlog only ever shows you what is still undone.

Done · 3	Anything finished today, any list. The daily pick is 1–3 from Next, so three is a full day, not a stretch.
Pro · 1	A Pro item finished. Exactly one — that's the whole transition commitment, and the number that quietly reports whether the calendar block held.
Triaged · 5	Items given a do / divide / block decision. Rewards emptying, not just finishing.
Captured · 1	Things written down instead of carried around. A zero here usually means a day spent holding things in your head.

What is deliberately not scored. The size of In, and the stranded-date count. Shrinking those is weekly work — a number that can't move on a good Tuesday is a number that punishes. They're shown as 7-day trends in the progress sheet, as information, never as a score.

The streak counts days with at least one thing finished — not days where every target was hit. Today sitting at zero doesn't break it; the day isn't over.

Why it has to be written down as it happens. Google Tasks is a store of state: it knows what's open right now and nothing about what yesterday looked like. Completions leave a timestamp, so Done and Pro can be re-read after the fact — but a triaged item leaves no trace at all once it has moved. So the app keeps its own day-by-day record, in the browser, and folds the two sources together: counted as you act, re-derived from timestamps on every sync, keeping whichever is larger. That way work done in the Google Tasks app still counts, and a cleared list doesn't silently zero the day.

It's a nudge, not a record of account, and losing it costs nothing.

It is no longer device-local. The browser copy stays the primary one, but a compact one-line-per-day form is also kept in a gtd-meta list in Google Tasks, so the phone and the Mac stop each building a private history of the same week. Merging takes the larger of the two values per field — the counters only ever go up within a day, so that is exactly right.

Rule 4 refuses to build a tree, and pays for it in visibility: one task per action means every finished step simply leaves the list, so a worked week can still feel like nothing happened. But the steps leave a trail — same Projet — prefix, in completion order — and that trail is the map of the progress, at no maintenance cost. The progress sheet draws both: the week's completed tasks by day, and each project's trail with its live next action underneath.

The one thing the trail shows that a tree could not: a project whose next action was never written. That is the exact failure the completion step exists to prevent, and it is invisible in any list of open tasks — the project just quietly stops existing.

The app keeps one list of its own in Google Tasks, gtd-meta, created the first time it has something to store. It holds what Google Tasks has nowhere else to put — the scoreboard history and the date of the last finished weekly review — one record per task, payload in the notes field, with a README as its first item.

It is a store, not work. Nothing in it is a task: it is excluded from every queue, from the hard landscape, from the context filter and from the vocabulary, so it can never show up as something to do. It is not yours to edit by hand, and deleting it is safe — the app recreates it.

A separate Pro list, never interleaved with personal — put deep, deadline-free transition work next to "buy jeans" and the errands win every time, because they're smaller, clearer, and finishable. The daily pick includes exactly one pro next action, defended with a real calendar block. Genuinely dated pro items go on the hard landscape, not in the ordered list. Same five rules on both sides — two vocabularies would be one too many.