In Part 1, I said that the fix is structural, not personal. This part and the next one are the structure.

A trusted system has two halves. Everything goes in. The right things come back out. This part is about the first half, getting every commitment out of your head and into a system. Part 3 is about the second half, how all that information becomes an answer to “what now?”

This part is about describing your work clearly and cleanly. Every “what’s next?” decision you’ll ever face gets made with the information you record here. Garbage in, garbage out. Good data in, good decisions out. First, the data.

Fair warning: if you’ve read Getting Things Done, the shape of this part will look familiar. It should. David Allen got the core loop right twenty-five years ago, captured everything, clarified what it means, organized the results, and I’m not going to pretend I invented a different wheel for this. Where this guide parts ways with GTD isn’t the loop. It’s what happens after the loop, and that’s Part 3’s story. For now, we’re covering the fundamentals the way I wish someone had explained them to me. But even if you are familiar with GTD I still recommend reading this part since the system emphasizes some things that GTD does not.