New: Roadmaps ordered paths through our cheat sheets and flashcards, so you always know what to study next.
Explore themSee what's new on GitHubFrom an inbox you don't trust to a productivity system that runs on its own.
A 13-step learning path. Follow it in order, or jump to what you need.
This path is for anyone with a job, a full inbox, and more meetings than hours who wants a system for deciding what to do next instead of just reacting to whatever showed up last. It walks through David Allen's Getting Things Done workflow and mainstream time management frameworks alongside Cal Newport's rules for deep work, energy management, and cutting digital and meeting noise, over about 6 to 10 weeks at a few hours a week. It does not cover the habit-formation science behind why routines stick or fall apart (see Build Better Habits & Focus for that) or team-facing project management practice like Scrum and sprint planning. By the end you can run a GTD-style capture-clarify-organize-reflect-engage workflow, protect a real block of deep work on your calendar, and choose async communication or delegate a task instead of letting your day get eaten by someone else's priorities.
Expected: you're juggling tasks, email, and meetings for work or school. Helpful but not required: a digital calendar and a note-taking app you already use.
Every open loop in your head is costing you focus before you've done a single task, so today you set up one trusted place to catch them all: the capture-clarify-organize-reflect-engage workflow this whole path builds on.
Step 1 gave you a trusted place to put everything you capture, and now you give that pile a direction: turn a vague 'get organized' intention into a goal specific and dated enough to actually drive your weekly review.
With goals from step 2 to aim at, you still need a way to pick today's work out of everything on your GTD lists, and the Eisenhower Matrix, MIT, and time-blocking techniques here are exactly that filter.
You can catch every task, email, and idea into one inbox and know exactly what today's top three actually are. Next up: turning that clarity into blocks of real concentration.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
This is where the real shift happens: once your lists and priorities from steps 1 through 3 are sorted, the limiting factor stops being what to do and becomes whether you can actually concentrate on it, so expect this one to take repeated practice.
Deep work from step 4 still needs a way to start today instead of someday, and a 25-minute timer with a mandatory break is the smallest ritual for turning 'I should focus' into a session you actually run.
Here's the part almost everyone gets wrong about steps 3 through 5: you've been managing the clock, but your output actually tracks your physical, mental, and emotional energy, so this is where you learn to schedule the hard stuff for when you're genuinely sharp.
You can name your own energy peaks and put a genuine deep-work session on the calendar instead of hoping one happens between meetings. A few minutes of due flashcards on steps 1 through 6 keeps the GTD workflow and the deep work rules fresh while you tackle the noise around them next.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Your energy from step 6 drains fastest through the phone in your pocket and the dozen tabs open right now, and an honest audit of what you actually consume is how you stop losing hours a week to app-switching alone.
Trimming your inputs in step 7 only helps if you also fix how you send and receive them, and defaulting to async over sync is the single change that protects the deep work blocks from step 5 most reliably.
Meetings are the one interruption you can't mute the way step 8 taught you to mute a notification, so this closes the loop with the 5 Ps and the async-first filter that keeps a calendar invite from swallowing the focus blocks steps 4 through 6 just earned you.
You can run an honest audit of what you consume, default to async over a reflex meeting invite, and walk into the meetings that remain with a real agenda instead of a vague one. Next up: getting more done without doing it all yourself.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Everything so far has assumed you're the one doing the work, and once meetings from step 9 are under control the next bottleneck is your own capacity, so this hands you the 7 Levels and RACI to hand off what doesn't need to be yours.
Take this if step 1's capture stage still feels shaky on paper: it compares Zettelkasten, PARA, and Cornell notes so you can pick a digital system built for the same collect-and-retrieve job GTD's inbox does.
Choose this route if you'd rather run steps 1 through 3 inside a dedicated app than a notebook: it walks through setting up projects, labels, and recurring reviews inside one of the most common GTD-friendly task managers.
Bring it together: not a stricter schedule but the case for boundaries you actually choose, folding steps 1 through 12's capture system, focus blocks, and delegation into a pace you can sustain past the first excited week.
You turned a scattered inbox into a capture-clarify-organize-reflect-engage system, put real focus time on your own calendar, and learned when to hand work to someone else instead of squeezing it in: that's the Personal Productivity & Deep Work badge.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Finish every required step, at least 70% of them genuinely done (not skipped), to earn this badge and 500 XP.