Getting Things Done With Exactly 5 Features

David Allen's GTD methodology adapted for a todo app with list, add, update, delete, and toggle. It's more possible than you'd think.

David Allen published Getting Things Done in 2001. It has sold millions of copies. It has an entire industry of adjacent books, courses, YouTube channels, and Notion templates built around it. Productivity communities treat it with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious texts.

AnotherTodo has five features. Four of them are basic CRUD.

This post is about how those two things work together. Surprisingly well, as it turns out, although we will be honest about the parts where it falls apart.

What GTD actually says

Getting Things Done is built on one core insight that Allen then elaborates into a system.

The insight: your brain is bad at holding open loops. Every unfinished task, every “I should remember to…” rattling around in your head consumes cognitive resources. The anxiety of trying to remember things interferes with your ability to actually do things.

The solution Allen proposes: get it out of your head. Capture everything into a trusted external system, process it into actionable tasks, organize those tasks into the right context, review regularly, and then just do the work.

He calls this five steps: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, Engage.

This framework is genuinely useful. The rest of GTD — the contexts, the two-minute rule, the weekly review ritual, the tickler file — is the system Allen built around that insight. The system is good. It’s also where most people fall off the wagon, because maintaining a complete GTD system is a part-time job.

AnotherTodo can handle the insight. The system is on you.

Step 1: Capture → add_todo

The capture phase is about externalizing. Get the thing out of your head before it evaporates or eats processing cycles.

GTD is dogmatic about this. Capture everything. The grocery item, the project idea, the thing you realized at 11pm that you need to email someone about tomorrow. Don’t evaluate it. Don’t decide where it goes. Just get it out.

add_todo is capture. You can call it from Claude with plain language: “add call the dentist to my todo list.” You can call it from the web app. You can call it from anything with an API key. The friction is low by design.

The MCP integration is genuinely useful here. One of the most common failure modes in capture is the delay between the thought and the record — you’re in the middle of something, you have a thought, you tell yourself you’ll write it down in a minute, and then you don’t. If Claude is already open (and increasingly it is), add_todo is three words away.

Capture doesn’t require good task descriptions. At this stage, “dentist” is fine. “Email thing” is fine. “The project idea from Monday” is fine. The point is to get it out. You’ll clean it up next.

Step 2: Clarify → update_todo

GTD’s clarify step is about processing your inbox: looking at each captured item and deciding what it is. Is it actionable? If not, delete it or archive it. If yes, what’s the actual next action?

The “what’s the actual next action” question is the most useful part of GTD. It forces specificity. “Project” is not a next action. “Email Sarah about project kickoff date” is a next action. The brain knows how to do the second one.

update_todo is clarify. Go through your list. Find the vague entries. Make them specific.

• “dentist” → “call dentist to schedule cleaning, number is in contacts”
• “project thing” → “email Sarah to confirm kickoff date is still March 5”
• “the thing from Monday” → “review Q1 budget draft and send feedback to Tom”

This is also where you delete things. delete_todo handles the GTD instruction to trash anything not actionable and not worth keeping. Most captured items are worth keeping. Some aren’t. Delete them.

The clarify step is worth doing regularly. A list of vague tasks is almost as bad as no list at all — you look at it, you don’t know what to do, and you close the tab.

Step 3: Organize → you have one list

This is where GTD and AnotherTodo part ways, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.

GTD’s organize step involves sorting tasks into contexts and projects. Contexts are about where or how you can do something: @computer, @phone, @errands, @waiting. Projects are collections of tasks that share a goal. The organize step is what turns a list into a system.

AnotherTodo has one list.

There are no contexts. There are no projects. There are no tags, labels, or categories. There is a list. You can add things to it and reorder them by editing the text (put a number at the start if you feel strongly about sequence). That’s the organizational toolkit.

For some people, this is a dealbreaker. If you’re running multiple projects, tracking waiting-on items separately from active tasks, and switching between work and personal contexts throughout the day — you need more structure than this.

For other people — those with a single job, a manageable number of tasks, or a preference for simplicity over comprehensiveness — the flat list works. You glance at it, you pick something, you do it. No navigation required.

The workaround some people use: prefix tasks with a category. “Work: review Q1 budget.” “Home: buy bins.” It’s crude, but list_todos will surface them together, and you can do a quick mental filter. Not elegant. But functional.

Step 4: Reflect → list_todos

GTD calls for regular reviews. The weekly review is the cornerstone: go through your entire system, clear the inbox, update project lists, check that nothing has fallen through the cracks.

list_todos is reflect. Look at your list. What’s done? What’s stale? What’s missing?

The weekly review in AnotherTodo is short, because the list is flat. There’s no project list to review, no contexts to sweep, no tickler file to check. You open the list, you look at everything, you delete the things that no longer matter, you update the things that have changed, you add anything you’ve been carrying in your head.

Ten minutes, maximum. Probably five.

This is either a feature or a limitation depending on what you need. If your GTD system has 200 tasks spread across 15 projects and you regularly lose things in the system, the AnotherTodo weekly review is a relief. If you need the full contextual picture to feel oriented, it’s too thin.

The honest position: for a tool with 5 features, the reflect step works. It’s fast because there’s nothing to get lost in.

Step 5: Engage → toggle_todo

The engage step is simple. Do the work. Trust your system.

toggle_todo marks something done. It moves it from the open list to the completed state. You did the thing. Toggle it.

This is the satisfying part. GTD’s entire preceding apparatus — the capture, the clarify, the organize, the review — exists to make the engage step frictionless. You should never sit down to work and wonder what to do next, because the system has already told you.

In AnotherTodo, this means looking at your list and picking the most important thing on it. Not the most fun thing. Not the easiest thing. The most important thing.

That’s your call. The app doesn’t enforce priorities because priorities are contextual. You know what needs doing more than a sorting algorithm does. Trust that.

Where GTD breaks down on one list

No contexts. If you’re waiting for a reply before you can move forward on something, there’s no clean way to mark it “waiting” without cluttering the active list. Workaround: “WAITING: reply from Sarah re: budget” — ugly but visible.

No projects. If you have 15 tasks that all relate to a single goal, you can’t group them. They coexist with your grocery list. Workaround: prefix them. “Project X: do the thing.” Still no rollup, no status, no deadline.

No recurring tasks. GTD doesn’t say much about recurring tasks directly, but in practice, most people’s systems include them. AnotherTodo doesn’t. You’ll be re-adding “weekly review” to your list manually. Once a week. Every week. Until you stop.

No inbox vs. active distinction. GTD is explicit about the inbox being a temporary holding zone before tasks are clarified and filed. AnotherTodo collapses inbox and active list into the same place. This means your unclarified items sit next to your ready-to-do items, which creates noise. The workaround is to clarify immediately on capture — which is actually better GTD practice anyway, but requires discipline.

The core insight survives

David Allen would probably not endorse this product. The system he built requires more structure than five API endpoints.

But his core idea — get things out of your head and into a trusted external system — works with literally any list. A napkin. A voice memo. A sticky note on your monitor. And yes, a flat todo list with five features.

The sophistication of GTD is not in the tools it requires. It’s in the habit of capture, the discipline of clarifying vague items into actionable ones, and the regularity of review. Those habits are portable. They work in AnotherTodo. They work in a paper notebook. They work in a plain text file.

What GTD’s system gives you is a guarantee that nothing falls through the cracks at scale. If you have 300 open commitments across 20 projects, you need that guarantee, and AnotherTodo won’t provide it.

If you have 20 tasks and one job, you don’t need 300 features to not drop the ball. You need to write things down, check the list, and do the next most important thing.

That’s it. That’s the core of GTD. And add_todo, list_todos, update_todo, delete_todo, and toggle_todo are more than enough to do it.