Note-taking method
Best GTD for Creatives
Getting Things Done — a workflow for capturing and processing tasks. For creatives, the working week is fleeting ideas and visual references that dissolve before they become work. The rest of this page is the method, cut for that week.
By tentus team · Updated 2026-09-20
What GTD actually asks of you
Get every commitment out of your head and into one trusted inbox, then decide the very next physical action for each.
Lists are organized by the verb — call, draft, review — never by topic. The non-negotiable part is the review: without it the lists rot into noise within two weeks.
How creatives put it to work
- 1
Reference with a reason
Every saved image or piece carries the line: why it stopped you. A reference library of reasons is usable; a folder of pretty pictures is a landfill you never reopen.
- 2
Material experiments, recorded
What you tried, with what, and what happened — captured while the result is in front of you. Technique builds on recorded attempts, not on a feeling that last time went better.
- 3
Old ideas next to new briefs
Concepts from years ago surface beside the current brief, and recombination happens on its own. The idea you can't use yet is kept, not lost — that's the point of the shelf.
The capture habit, the linking, and the retrieval are the parts tentus automates — gtd without the daily upkeep.
Try it with tentus
tentus makes GTD practical for creatives. Capture, link, and retrieve without the busywork.
Other methods worth trying
Zettelkasten
A slip-box method for connecting atomic ideas into a web of knowledge.
PARA Method
Organize information by Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.
Atomic Notes
One idea per note, linked to others through context.
Progressive Summarization
Layer summaries on top of captured content as you revisit it.
GTD for other roles
Product Managers
juggling research, specs, stakeholder feedback, and launch plans across multiple tools.
Software Engineers
losing context between code reviews, incident postmortems, and technical research.
Designers
scattered moodboards, design critiques, and research that never gets referenced again.
Researchers
drowning in PDFs and citations with no way to connect findings across projects.