The GTD App Setup That Actually Sticks: Inbox, Today, Someday

TL;DR: GTD systems fail from over-engineering, not under-engineering. The setup that survives is five views (Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday), a two-minute daily triage, and a weekly review. You can build this in most apps; in Done Bear it’s the default navigation, which is one less thing to maintain.

Getting Things Done is twenty-five years old and still the most durable idea in personal productivity: get every commitment out of your head into a system you trust, so your attention is free for the task in front of you.

The book’s method has five steps: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. Most abandoned GTD setups die in step three: people build elaborate label taxonomies, energy-level tags, and context lists for a life they don’t actually lead. The system becomes a hobby, then a chore, then a graveyard.

Here’s the minimal version that sticks.

The five views

Every task lives in exactly one of five places:

1. Inbox: everything you capture, before you’ve decided what it means. The only rule: capture must be instant. If adding a task takes more than a couple of seconds, you’ll stop doing it, and the whole system dies at step one.
2. Today: the short list you’ve committed to finishing today. Not everything due today; everything you chose today. Six items is a strong day.
3. Upcoming: tasks with a real date: the flight, the renewal, the review meeting. Date means “when this becomes relevant,” not “when I aspire to do it.”
4. Anytime: available work you could pick up when Today runs dry. This is the active backlog.
5. Someday: parked ideas you’re explicitly not committing to. Someday is what keeps Anytime honest; without it, your backlog fills with guilt.

Projects group related tasks; a couple of labels (say, errand and deep-work) are plenty. If a label doesn’t change what you’d pick next, delete it.

The two habits that keep it alive

Daily triage (two minutes). Each morning: empty the Inbox into the right view, then pick Today. That’s it. You’re not planning the week; you’re deciding what “done” means for one day.

Weekly review (twenty minutes). Once a week: skim every project, push stale Anytime items to Someday, pull ripe Someday items back, and delete what no longer matters. The review is the step everyone skips and the reason systems rot. Put it on a recurring task, in the system itself.

Run it in any app, or an app that runs it for you

You can shape most task managers into these five views. In Todoist that’s a filter set; in TickTick, custom smart lists; in Notion, a database with views. It works, but you are now the system’s maintainer, and setups you maintain are setups that drift.

The alternative is an app where the five views are the actual product. Done Bear is built that way: Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, and Someday are the navigation, plus a Logbook of everything you’ve finished. There’s nothing to configure and therefore nothing to break in month three.

Two properties matter more than they sound:

• Local-first speed. Capture and triage only become habits when they’re instant. Done Bear renders from your device and syncs in the background, so the Inbox opens as fast offline as online. (More on why in Why Offline-First Beats Cloud-Only.)
• Capture from anywhere. The system only works if everything lands in one Inbox, so Done Bear takes capture from web, desktop, iOS, a Raycast extension, a CLI, and even your AI assistant via MCP.

Start smaller than feels right

Whatever app you use: five views, a two-minute triage, a weekly review, and the discipline to keep Today short. Add complexity only when a real problem demands it, not because the app offers it.

That’s the whole setup. It sticks precisely because there’s so little of it.