GTD, or Getting Things Done, is a set of principles and practices first outlined by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
We won’t try to explain the system here. No one could do it better than Mr. Allen. If you haven’t read his book, we highly recommend that you do so.
You can get a copy here.
Please note that this is not an affiliate link. If you buy a copy, we are not compensated in any way. We simply believe in the value of the system. We are not affiliated in any way with David Allen or GTD.
uGTD, or the Ultimate Getting Things Done app, is a set of tools intended to help you apply the GTD principles to your work and your life.
It’s designed to help you capture, clarify, and organize your stuff — to get it out of your head and into a trusted system — with the goal of having a “mind like water.”
This app is meant to complement the book, not replace it.
“Ultimate” is a big word, and it’s not really a claim that we’re making. It’s more of an aspiration.
Some time back, David Allen released his ideas for a GTD app into the public domain and challenged developers to create the “ultimate” GTD app. This is our attempt to answer that challenge.
We’ll let you — and perhaps Mr. Allen — decide how well we’ve done.
This app is still in early development. It is a work in progress, and always will be. There will always be apps that do some things better than we do. But there are already things we do that no one else does.
And we will always strive to adhere faithfully to the principles of GTD because, in our experience, they work.
uGTD didn’t start as a startup idea. It started as frustration.
We’ve used Getting Things Done for years. The principles work. But the tools always felt like compromises.
Some apps were too simple. Some were too complex. Some drifted from GTD philosophy. Some tried to be everything to everyone.
None quite felt like a faithful, thoughtful implementation of the system.
At some point, we stopped looking for the “right” app and started building our own. Not because we wanted to launch a company, but because we wanted a system we could trust.
Something clean. Explicit. True to the principles. Designed around real workflow, not feature checklists.
When David Allen challenged developers to build the “ultimate” GTD app, that word stuck. Not as a boast, but as a direction.
uGTD is our answer to that challenge. It’s built deliberately. It evolves carefully. And it exists because GTD works — when the tool gets out of the way.
“Ultimate” doesn’t mean perfect. It means never finished. It means always refining.