The AI Getting Things Done Coach skill for Claude

You download the zip at the top of this page, put it in your Claude environment and from that moment Claude processes your inbox according to this logic. What a skill actually is and why that is different from a loose prompt is explained in full in what are Claude skills NL.

Loose commitments spread across paper, apps, email and memory can make it harder to keep an overview. GTD offers a way to capture and clarify them. The file does not claim that open loops explain almost all stress or procrastination, or that making a list guarantees relief. Missing time, changing demands and other circumstances can also matter.

This coach is written for people juggling several things at once who have lost the overview: business owners with projects alongside client work, freelancers who do their own admin, team leads with a double diary, and anyone who feels they are behind on everything. The file's description explicitly names that as a trigger, together with phrases like I keep forgetting things, my head is full and I do not know what to do first. It is part of the library of 100 free skills that we make available from the AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards.

There is one thing you need to know upfront. It sorts, it does not work for you. That distinction sounds trivial and in practice it changes everything. It turns a chaotic head into an organised system with concrete first steps, but you still have to take the steps yourself. And it stores nothing: you get structured text back that you put somewhere yourself, in the app you already use or in a document. Not a shortcoming, but precisely the reason the file is so small and works everywhere.

Your list has subjects on it, not actions. Build a website is not a task but a project. Something with the blog is not even that. A vague line may be difficult to act on; its wording does not diagnose what a particular person’s brain does or why work is delayed. A hard rule applies here: an action is always a physical act you can literally carry out, and a project is anything that takes more than one step. So for every project it keeps asking until it reaches the first physical step.

Everything is dumped in one pile. Calls, emails, errands and thinking work are all mixed together, even though you can never do them at the same moment. GTD solves that with contexts: practical places or states in which an action is possible. As examples the file names @calls, @computer, @office, @home, @errands for shopping on the go, @low energy, @high energy, @with partner and @with team. If you are standing in a queue with ten minutes and a phone, you open @calls, not your whole list.

Small actions may be cheaper to finish during processing. Recording and revisiting a short action can add overhead. The guideline suggests doing it during processing only when it is appropriate, authorised and possible now. Otherwise record it; the duration estimate is not a measured universal saving.

There is no place for things that are not an action. An idea for two years from now, an article you want to keep, a thought that does not need to go anywhere: without a place for them, they keep floating around among your real tasks. GTD gives them their own destination, namely Someday/Maybe, Reference and Trash, and that separation is exactly why the action list stays readable afterwards.

Nobody checks the system. Every list goes stale. Projects slip, delegated things do not come back, and after two weeks your overview no longer matches reality. That is why the SKILL.md requires the skill to include a weekly review with every plan, and that review is concrete: go through the calendar two weeks back and two weeks ahead, go through every list, put the project list next to the next-actions list so each active project has a next action or an explicit waiting/calendar follow-up, clean up the waiting-for list and do a fresh mind sweep for whatever has come in since last week.

In diff form, with lines from the skill's example: what goes out and what comes back in its place.

Not just the tidy terms like Getting Things Done, GTD, mind sweep, weekly review, next action and inbox zero, but also the way people actually say it: I keep forgetting things, my head is full, too many open tasks, I do not know what to do first, empty my head. There is even an explicit instruction to trigger for business owners running several projects at once who feel they are behind on everything.

After that comes a short paragraph on sources and theory, and immediately after that the method, which must be followed in order without exception. Step 1 is Capture: the user writes down everything on their mind, without filtering and without sorting, work and personal mixed together. If the user already supplies a list, the file states literally that the list is taken over without reinterpretation, and the original remains available beside the clarified interpretation.

Step 2 is Clarify, with the six questions from FIG.02 above. Step 3 is Organise: every processed item goes to one of the seven places shown in FIG.03 below. That step also carries the instruction on contexts, with nine examples and the explicit order to use whatever fits the user's life and never to invent labels.

Reflect includes a weekly-review checklist as a central maintenance practice, not the only possible cadence or a guarantee that a system works. Engage then considers context, available time, energy and priority. Active projects need a next action or an explicit waiting/calendar follow-up, so a blocked project is not given an invented executable step.

The file then fixes the output in eleven blocks with set names, from What I see in your inbox to First physical action (NOW), so every answer looks the same and you can lay two sessions side by side. It closes with the worked example from FIG.01, five lines under the heading Important rules, and three sources. If you want to learn to build a file like this yourself, writing a SKILL.md NL explains the structure step by step.

The system comes from David Allen. Getting Things Done was published in 2001 and got a revised edition in 2015. The starting point of that book is that your head is not a good place to store things. It is excellent at coming up with ideas and judging them and downright bad at storage, and yet most people mainly use it as storage. The five steps are how Allen moves that storage outside your head, with the emphasis on the question of the next physical action.

The detail rests on the GTD Methodology Guide. The second source in the file is the methodology guide from the David Allen Company. That is where the practical details come from that make the difference between a nice idea and a working system: the contexts, the split between projects and actions, and the design of the weekly review.

The explanation comes from Masicampo and Baumeister. Their 2011 studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined specific plans for unfulfilled goals and measured cognitive interference. The results do not establish that merely listing tasks guarantees relief, that almost all stress has one cause, or that this prompt has been clinically validated.

Try capturing what is on your mind, clarifying whether each item needs action, and identifying the next physical step where appropriate. The two-minute guideline applies only when the action fits the context and authority. The file supplies a process to review; it does not establish that an assistant has followed it or completed the work.

If the installation gets stuck anywhere, or you want the steps with screenshots, the full explanation is in installing Claude skills NL. After that, using it is simple: type everything on your mind into a message, without sorting it, and let the skill do its work. The messier the dump, the more it delivers. If you are new to this kind of work and want the wider context first, you will find the explanation of working with AI in the knowledge base.

There are also situations where you are better off leaving it alone. For choosing between two roughly equal projects GTD does not help, because the method organises what is there and does not weigh up what it is worth. If you want to set urgency against importance, the Eisenhower Matrix Coach skill is the tool for that, and the background on that model is on the page about the Eisenhower matrix NL. If the problem is not in your list but in the goals behind it, start with the SMART Goals Coach skill, because a list cannot fix the fact that you are working on the wrong things.

A second limit is behaviour. GTD tells you what the next step is, not how to get yourself to take it. If you keep putting off actions that are clear and small, habits may be one factor to explore, without diagnosing the cause from the task list, and the Atomic Habits Coach skill is a more logical starting point. If you do manage to start but keep getting interrupted, it is about concentration, and the Flow State Coach skill takes you further.

And the most important honest limit: the skill is not a task-list app. It stores nothing between sessions, it sends no reminders and it does not look at your calendar. What it delivers is structured text that you put somewhere yourself. That is exactly why it works everywhere and costs nothing, but it also means the upkeep stays with you. If you want the upkeep itself taken off your hands, the conversation continues in the next section.

With a stand-alone skill you run into that: every session starts empty, so you supply your lists, your contexts and your open actions again every time. That is exactly the problem Jarvis solves, from €9 per month including VAT. If it is not about your inbox but about a whole team's, having the work prepared for you becomes a real option, and that is the AI employee.