Brian Eno said something in 1995 about computer sequencers that I keep coming back to: they remove the issue of skill and replace it with the issue of judgment. When anyone can produce professional-sounding music with software, the question stops being can you do it and becomes of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do.
AI has done the same thing to knowledge work at a scale Eno probably didn’t imagine. Writing, coding, analysis, design — the barriers to producing competent output are collapsing. Skill still matters, but it’s no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is knowing what’s worth producing in the first place.
I’ve been a GTD practitioner ever since reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done years ago. The method stuck. Over the years I’ve cycled through most of the tools — OmniFocus, Things, Todoist, plain text files. None of them were bad. But none of them were built for a world where AI is a participant in your work, not just a sidebar. More on that later.
A Judgment Framework
On the surface GTD looks like task management — lists, inboxes, contexts, next actions. But the deeper you go, the more you realize the system is structured around a single repeated act: deciding what matters.
Every step in the GTD workflow is a judgment call. Capture is choosing what deserves attention. Clarify is deciding what something actually means to you. Organize is committing to where it belongs in your life. Reflect is reassessing whether your commitments still make sense. Engage is choosing, right now, what matters most.
None of that is mechanical. All of it is judgment. GTD is a framework built entirely around the bottleneck that AI has made unavoidable. It trains you to look at an overflowing inbox — of ideas, of possibilities, of things you could build — and make clear calls about what deserves your energy.
The Discipline of Review
GTD earns its keep in the review. You step back, look at everything you’ve committed to, and ask hard questions. Is this still worth doing? Has the context changed? What looked urgent a few days ago might be irrelevant now. What I dismissed as a distraction might be the most important thing on the list.
This isn’t organizing. It’s reckoning. You sit with your commitments and decide, again, whether they deserve your time. That regular confrontation with your own priorities is the core practice. The lists and folders are scaffolding for this one discipline.
A Practice That Compounds
GTD is closer to a fitness practice than a piece of infrastructure. You don’t finish reviewing your commitments. You don’t complete the habit of clarifying your inputs. You do it again next week, and the week after, and each time you get slightly better at recognizing what actually matters versus what just feels urgent.
That skill compounds. It’s direction over speed. When you can generate endless output, the person who knows what not to build has the advantage.
GTD didn’t anticipate AI. But it anticipated the problem AI creates: too many possibilities, not enough clarity about which ones matter. The practice of regularly confronting that question is worth more now than when David Allen first wrote it down.
I mentioned that none of the GTD tools I’ve used were built for this moment. That’s why I built TR-1 — task management for humans and AI, grounded in GTD. It’s where this practice lives for me now.