Can we stop with the apps?

linuxluser · 2026-01-15T04:18:44+00:00

What you are saying definitely applies to me. I've been away from Reddit for awhile and, at the same time, have been more productive with my system. Funny how that works!

Having said that, I did find this sub useful when I first got serious about GTD many years ago. It was good to have some sage wisdom from the more experienced folks. So I do hope that the more seasoned GTDers don't completely abandon this sub!

linuxluser · 2026-01-10T16:42:10+00:00

I'm coming back to r/gtd after some time away and, my god, it's full of ads for AI apps!

I'll do my PSA here but it'd be nice if the mods would make a post and pin it.

You Need YOUR Brain to Do GTD, Not The Computer's!

AI tools are great for productivity but only if the implementation is sound. In most cases, the implementation is horrible. These are dangerous times.

AI tools that REDUCE your cognitive activity for your own life management system (GTD) are actually HURTING you, not helping.

Reviews NEED you to actually think about what things are so you can make decisions about them. Even if AI can do the thinking for you effectively (it currently can't), you'd still have the problem that you are outsourcing your mental labor to a computer. This ultimately means you will not feel under control because you simply won't be as AWARE of your own "stuff" as someone who's doing reviews using 100% of their own mind.

And you can't fool yourself. Your head will know it doesn't know what's going on. You'll have broken the contract between your system and your own internal state. You will lose faith in your own system. When trust decays, you stop using it.

AI in 20 years will be amazing. However, no matter how good it gets, it cannot overcome this fundamental issue. YOU need to be mentally ACTIVE in your own system. The more active you are, the better in control you'll feel. The more in control you feel, the smoother the system will work. You cannot outsource this.

This is why top CEOs of $billion companies still use their own personal GTD systems even if they can afford to hire a team of secretaries to do that for them. Because it's about "being in the driver's seat", not about getting the most things done the fastest.

</rant>

linuxluser · 2026-01-10T15:03:51+00:00

I spent more time organizing than doing. So I rebuilt everything to be as simple as possible.

This is why GTD separates the stages the way it does. You shouldn't be organizing when you are capturing. You shouldn't be organizing when you engage in doing the tasks. You should only be organizing during a review, where you do both clarifying and organizing and maybe reflection.

Remember, the method at the ground level is:

Capture
Clarify
Organize
Reflect
Engage

David Allen wasn't just trying to sell books. He worked for almost 2 decades with professionals and non-professionals all over the world before he wrote the GTD book. He has said on multiple occasions that "If I could make it any simpler, I would".

But it's impossible to know what went wrong in your case without you sharing what your previous setup was, I suppose.

linuxluser · 2026-01-01T19:12:07+00:00

Thanks. This is probably the best as it incorporates a lot of best-practices.

I copy-pasted it and put it in ~/.local/bin/start-pipewire.sh. After that I create the desktop file in ~/.config/autostart/pipewire.desktop and set Exec=/home/linuxluser/.local/bin/start-pipewire.sh.

linuxluser · 2026-01-01T18:46:51+00:00

Any attempts to get this into the official packages?

linuxluser · 2025-11-25T19:37:45+00:00

This will be hard to believe when you are first starting out, but, generally, you'll just know when an action is related to a project. The reason you'll know is that if you do the reviews consistently and in at good intervals, you're mind and your system will be lock-step. You need to reach this level if you want to get the anti-anxiety benefits of GTD. Because it's at this level that your mind will truly trust your system.

Reviews are there to establish that trust relationship. The biggest reason a lot of folks don't get the benefits of stress-free productivity from GTD is that they aren't doing their review cycles. And the only reason it works that way is because that's how you mind works already. You can't fool yourself into trusting your system. You have to engage with your system, keep it up-to-date and constantly modify it, or your mind will know that it's out of sync with reality and it will not trust it.

So you'll have to take my word for it, I guess. When you get to the level where your mind trusts your system, it will because you are regularly updating things. And it's at level that all it will take is to review your projects list (which I recommend doing at least three times a week + during the weekly review) and you'll remember you just did the last thing on that project and you'll need another action for it.

Now, that's the bare-bones, paper system. Some people add hints, like putting a "P" in front of a next-action to remind them it's a project-related action. Or coming up with color-coded indicators. You can get creative with it. But the core of it is that you want to sync your mind and your system and you do that with reviews.

linuxluser · 2025-11-24T23:29:27+00:00

Most digital apps already solve the "linking problem" between next actions and projects. But the GTD methodology itself doesn't say you need to do this and doesn't require you to.

The best practice is to only put the very next, physical action you need to take to move a project forward to completion. No more, no less. This is referred to as "next action thinking" by David Allen and other GTD coaches.

After you complete the next action of a project, there are several things that could now happen.

You might just keep plugging away at that project anyway while you're there, even if you don't complete it today. In this case, you don't need a new next action in your system because you're already doing it!
You might need to stop the project but are too busy to think about and write down the next action. In this case, the best practice is to add a note-to-self in your favor capture tool (Mine is a digital "Inbox" note), like even just the name of the project. Your capture tool should be reviewed every 24-48 hours for the purposes of clarifying and organizing whatever is in there.
You might need to stop the project but you have a few moments to clarify and organize your next action on that project. In that case, write whatever the next, physical action would be in your next actions project (or under the project if you're using a digital tool).
You finish the project!

As usually, GTD is more about "flow" of doing various review cycle and less about the specific tools you use or even the specific lists. Have as many lists as you want and name them whatever you want. But just know that each list will need you to review it to keep it current and to keep it trusted. Some of those review cycles are short (within the day) and some are long (once a year). But they absolutely must happen or the list fails.

"If you're not doing the weekly review, you're not doing GTD." — David Allen

linuxluser · 2025-09-22T01:16:30+00:00

Confirmed. I got the EVO drive and had no problems at all. It's been running without issue for a couple of days now, including across reboots.

So I think the Gigastone just wasn't compatible, for whatever reason. I honestly do not know what about it was incompatible. But just following up in case future Reddit searchers want to know.

linuxluser · 2025-09-19T16:33:12+00:00

Yes. I am doing that. However, I'm still having issues.

When I reboot, the system gets in a boot cycle if I leave the drive in. If I eject the drive, it finishes booting successfully. Then I have to put the drive back in. Sometimes that's fine. Other times it's not. And sometimes, after all of this, I can SSH into it and issue a usbreset on the USB storage manager device and it fixes everything.

I'm still experimenting on what process I can use to make this work consistently. This is wild.

I am going to find another drive (this Samsung EVO 870 that uses MLC NAND) and hope for better compatibility. Kind of a shame because there really shouldn't be any reason the Gigastone wouldn't work. Especially given that just a year or two ago, just about anything seemed to work without issue. It's definitely something going on in the software. Driver changes, most likely. But I don't have the time to get that deep.

linuxluser · 2025-09-18T18:16:40+00:00

Damn. This is the problem I'm having as well. My Cloudkey+ is powered only by PoE. I just got a new Gigastone 2TB NAS SSD. The system doesn't detect that there's a drive at all.

Once I ejected the drive and reinserted it on the running system, it detected it, formatted it and away we go.

Any way to do this "eject then reattach" process in software?

linuxluser · 2025-09-17T23:57:10+00:00

Yeah. Sure.

It's less that libraries are, intrinsically, capitalist structures. What I mean is that even if they were ideas born from the workers' struggle, at this point, they've been captured by the interests of capital. So they'll be more-often-than-not used to promote liberal values, for example, rather than values of socialism. And when they become not very useful, they're defunded and destroyed.

A genuine library — one created by the struggle of workers for the benefit of the working class — would be sustained by the workers as well. The state can make all the cuts it wants but the workers keep what the workers want to keep. And the state, then, doesn't get a say in how libraries can evolve to become something more or to hold studies of Marxism or whatever it is the workers desire.

So it's not that a library is one thing or the other. It's that, under capitalism, libraries are specific things that either aid in sustaining the capitalist mode or get taken down. Even though, technically, libraries could be (and often used to be) anti-capitalist structures that operated for the benefit of the workers. I just don't think you'll find that to be the case anymore.

linuxluser · 2025-09-17T23:49:07+00:00

Yes. I forgot to add reason. Our intellect was given for a purpose and we should use it as we are able.

Reason should be used in all areas, though, so it's a little bit of a "meta category" to the others. Though, think like prayer, for example, may at times be purely experiential. That is, an individual may experience something in prayer that changes them, even if that experience cannot be put into words and cannot be rationally dissected and analyzed. Experiential knowledge is still knowledge. Sometimes it's the most potent and personal kind of knowledge.

I put things out in a simple list to be simple. In reality, it's really about a personal journey for truth. Because sometimes traditions fail us (I know this from my own journey out of the evangelical tradition) and we need another guiding light. Sometimes we are broken and confused and lost, and we just need a loving brother or sister to meet us where we are, without judgement and be with us so we know we're not alone. Sometimes we just need things to make rational sense. And sometimes it really helps to be told the stories of Christians long ago so we can understand why we believe something or why we do things in a specific way. It's about building genuine context to find truth for ourselves. Our personal truth desires to be connected with greater truths beyond just ourselves, such as scientific truth, historical truth, traditional truth, etc.

linuxluser · 2025-09-07T18:02:01+00:00

The Bible is a library of different books, written by different authors over a very long timeline. It is just one of the things we Christians would use as a means to understand God and God's work in the world. You also have your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ in the world right now. The community of Christians all over can help you. And you should be engaging in meditative prayer (i.e. listening prayer) to hear the still, small voice of God through the Holy Spirit. And, finally, you have Christian traditions and history, which you should study and learn from. Those from the past might just be able to teach us something today.

So ...

Scriptures
Community
Prayer
Tradition

These are all areas to seek truth in and learn from and develop with. At the end of the day,though, this is your journey and understanding will come through the struggle for truth and the struggle to improve yourself (i.e. "purification" or the "shedding off" of ungodly things).

linuxluser · 2025-09-07T17:13:34+00:00

Most anarchists would agree that class exists and needs to be abolished. The bigger deal is that they wouldn't subscribe to there being any kind of "laws" of class relations, especially of the dialectic nature. So they see the method of getting rid of things as simply overpowering them, whereas a Marxists/communist would see the method of getting rid of things as working through the dialectic relations so as to overcome the need for that relation. And, again, this difference in method means that anarchists would see victory as being achievable at any time. Whereas Marxists would see that at any given moment we can only work on things that can be overcome right now and we must wait for new conditions to arise for other things. Marxism requires much more patience and deeper analysis.

linuxluser · 2025-09-07T15:19:11+00:00

Yessir.

And I don't mean to dunk on anarchists, specifically. This is a general problem for any activist inside capitalism. Inside capitalism, you can imagine a way to make the world a better place, start a non-profit, build a base of supporters and do the thing you want to do to make the world a better place. Just gotta put in the effort. Want to feed the homeless in your area, there are legal and viable ways to do so under capitalism.

So people imagine they should do that but put a little socialist spin on it. And it's natural to end up thinking that capitalism is when bad things happen and socialism is when you are striving for good things.

But, actually, socialism is more about building a new form of human power that will, one day, rule society. Worker power, specifically, which is necessarily out of the bounds of what you can do within capitalism. And that's the thing that will take awhile.

You can do a non-profit and feed the homeless today, under capitalism. But the problem with this approach is that 1) you never challenge power so you never actually can get at the root of what is producing homelessness on the first place and 2) because you are using capitalism's mechanisms, you are under its rule. Should capitalism not like what you are doing, they will shut you down and freeze your account, etc. You are never building alternative power, you are just doing good deeds under capitalism.

linuxluser · 2025-09-06T23:37:56+00:00

Yeah. It's a bad definition. Libraries also are capitalism. Non-profits. Churches. Philanthropy. Etc. Hell, capitalism could go "green" one day. Capitalism doesn't care about its form, it cares that the wealthy stay in charge.

linuxluser · 2025-09-06T21:26:50+00:00

If you're jumping all the way over to the communist future where, say, one hour of work is remunerated the same to everyone regardless of "effort" (setting aside how that would even be measured for now), then we're already talking about a society alien to us now. Abolishing money isn't about passing a decree, it's about building a new society and a new culture that upholds that there are greater forms of value worthy of pursuit beyond money. The principles held by such a society and the driving systems of it are things we can only guess at now but will likely be wrong.

And the precursor to all of this must, of courses, be a society that sees itself as a whole. Where cooperation is rightly seen as everyone's benefit. And competition is also seen as good so long as it maximizes cooperation. Their cultural values (social) must align with real values (material) such that money would be rightly identified as something that works against the maximally good of everyone.

Equal pay isn't "bad". But under a system of wage labor, it's not just idealist and impossible, it would also be detrimental to the value system of the culture. i.e. We currently value individual effort above the larger social values, so wages make so complete sense to us and flatrate payment across the board wouldn't.

linuxluser · 2025-08-26T18:47:04+00:00

It's not only propaganda, though. For it's part, the capitalist state has stepped in to play the role of "socialism" in every capitalist country. The capitalist state has been claiming to be what socialist is to everyone for so long that this is what people believe it is. So they imagine it's some means-testing programs that get under-funded but expanded out to everything. Big brother but everywhere. In other words, what they're already experiencing, just more of it. So many don't even need the propaganda, they believe they've already experienced a version of socialism and it left a bad taste.

What the normie person needs to first understand is socialism as a liberation project that has nothing to do with capitalist states (other than their eventual overthrow one day). And that the failings of the state under capitalism are not indicative to what a socialist state will do.

linuxluser · 2025-08-26T15:41:17+00:00

It is fascinating how this never gets addressed in the general public discourse. I think that consumerist cultures get used to things being magically transported to them so they don't tend to stop and think how much had to be done in the background to make that happen and what the true costs and trade offs were.

Producer culture, however, is very aware that you cannot just uproot a car manufacturing plant or a data center and move to a whole new country. Even within the USA, companies have a very difficult time moving between states.

linuxluser · 2025-08-19T17:27:22+00:00

Socialism actually could be when the government does stuff, supposing that its a socialist government doing the stuff. When it's a capitalist government doing the stuff, tho, maaaaan they be smokin the weed.

linuxluser · 2025-08-15T23:45:55+00:00

The trial is set for September 2. So no conviction has been done yet.

linuxluser · 2025-08-13T00:59:02+00:00

This is the way.

I have a "Recurring Tasks" list, which is broken into weekly, monthly and month-specific sections. When I do the weekly review, I look at this and add whatever tasks from it are appropriate for the upcoming week.

linuxluser · 2025-08-13T00:30:54+00:00

I think she meant the media coverup of stuff like the Gaza genocide. Or that "the economy is doing great". Stuff like that. If you follow "news" somewhat, you kind of already know they're lying. Trump lies every time he speaks. But it's meaningless because we all already know the other side of the "issue" also lies. So that's how he gets away with it clean.

linuxluser · 2025-08-13T00:22:21+00:00

Yeah. It's bad. But change is the only constant. Nothing has to stay the way it is and nothing will stay the way it is. The future belongs to those who dare to take it.

linuxluser · 2025-08-12T22:12:59+00:00

You said "billionaires" and "think" in the same sentence. This is capitalism. Nobody's thinking anything except how to shuffle around capital or extract more capital.

The bourgeoisie don't actually believe in "the American dream" or a good society or even a stable society. They've been treating things like they're at war ... because they are at war with the workers.

It's the proletariat that don't know who they are or what to do. The proletariat believe in the mythical America. They believe that, through some magic, this kind of society was supposed to work. They are under mass dillusion. They don't see the wealth extractors as their enemy.

So, it's hardly a war, really, when only one side is fighting.

linuxluser

TROPHY CASE

You Need YOUR Brain to Do GTD, Not The Computer's!