The Total Capture Productivity Letters
Issue 1: January 1, 2025
Peter Gallant
January 01, 2025
Welcome to the Total Capture Productivity Newsletter
Welcome to the Total Capture Productivity Newsletter, where we will explore the key ideas behind developing the core habits and systems that will enable you to become more “productive”. Before we begin to discuss even the basics of what Total Capture Productivity is and how it works in this inaugural newsletter, I think it’s important to start with a brief discussion about the concept of productivity itself - what it means to us as individuals, and examine whether becoming more “productive” is even a worthwhile goal worth pursuing.
What Does “Productivity” Mean to You?
Mentioning the word “productivity” to practically anyone will probably elicit a mental image of someone who is working more. We generally equate productivity with doing more “work” - specifically in our professional life, rather than in our personal life. That preconception is an unfortunate one.
Who wants to invest time and energy in developing their own “productivity practice” just to do more at work?
For me, the goal of becoming more productive has always held a higher purpose: to do more of what I truly want to do across the entirety of my life - both personal and professional, and to create the conditions that will enable me to do my best work, and where to place my limited time, energy, focus and attention.
If you want to do what George Bernard Shaw suggests, and be “thoroughly used up” when you die, then the objective of becoming more productive across the entire spectrum of your life suddenly becomes much more interesting.
Productivity is not about working more. It’s about living more.
You Need a System: The Promise of Total Capture Productivity
You need a system.
Or at least, you need a systematic approach to how you determine where to focus your most limited personal resources - your time and attention.
The vast majority of thought leaders in the personal effectiveness and productivity space suggest using a “total capture” system to manage ourselves on a daily basis.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work suggests “confronting the dragon” of overwhelm by capturing all outstanding “open loops” (read: commitments).
Scott Young recently completed a month-long challenge focus on Productivity as part of his Foundations series, where he implemented “full capture” (of commitments) productivity system, as part of his approach.
In 2001, David Allen published Getting Things Done (GTD), which is a comprehensive productivity methodology that is also based on total capture. The GTD methodology defines a complete, end-to-end productivity system that still represents best practice. I implemented GTD in 2002 and it was literally life-changing. I still use the core GTD concepts in my productivity practice to this day. While the GTD approach is clearly defined, everyone I know who has truly implemented it has done so in different ways, and implementation of GTD or any productivity methodology to the point of consistent use takes significant time and effort - but it’s worth it in my view!
Manage Commitments, Not Time
So what actually gets “captured” in a total capture system?
Commitments
What gets captured and managed in a total capture system are commitments, as they appear throughout your day. As commitments appear, you need to capture them by writing them down or entering them into an app - anywhere that is outside your head, as trying to remember commitments as they stack up throughout the day is neither a good use of limited mental energy and can easily lead to a commitment being quickly forgotten, or at least the feeling that you are missing something important that you haven’t captured.
Capturing commitments is the foundation of Total Capture Productivity.
Total Capture Means Capturing Everything
Total capture means exactly that - you need to capture every single commitment, ideally as soon as it appears. Critically, this includes both personal and professional commitments that you make to others, and commitments that you make to yourself - with the latter often appearing as aspirational goals that start with the thought “I really need to…”
This is the key practice of any Total Capture Productivity system: identifying every commitment, large and small, across every aspect of your life, at every level and time horizon and immediately capturing them in a storage medium outside your head.
Why Do Any of This?
A focus on managing commitments instead of managing time, along with even a basic inventory of the commitments that you have already made to yourself and others is the starting point that will enable you do design and build your own Total Capture Productivity system, incorporating the best ideas and practices from thought leaders in the productivity space along the way.
The purpose of this newsletter is to help enable you to do exactly that.
Over the next several months, we will explore the key elements and design principles so you can build your own productivity practice - the habits and systems that will enable you to achieve whatever you want to do in 2025 and beyond!
That’s the goal.
Take Action: Make 2025 Your Year of Habits and Systems
For the next 30 days, you can begin the process of building your own Total Capture Productivity system by focusing on two key behaviours: identify and capture commitments.
Identify every commitment as it appears: personal and professional, big or small. Condition yourself to spot commitments - in conversations, meetings and in your email correspondence.
When you see a commitment appear - say “aha!”, or “there it is”, or some other trigger phrase (quietly, to yourself so others around you don’t begin to wonder if you’re OK), and mentally link the trigger to an overwhelming desire to get that newly-identified commitment out of your head before you “lose” it to some other distraction. You can capture these commitments in a small notebook that you carry, or in the Notes app on your smartphone - for now, anywhere outside your head that is always accessible to you is fine.
Once you have captured commitments across an entire day, take a few moments and plan using your current productivity habits how you are going to complete these commitments. Do this for a few days, and notice how you feel as a few “undone” commitments begin to build up on your commitment list.
A Cautionary Note
When you begin to capture commitments, you may be tempted to sit down and do a “brain dump” of all of the other commitments that you have built up across your life, rather than simply capturing the new commitments as they appear.
The risk of doing this is that you are very likely to end up with a very large list of incomplete commitments - this could not only trigger stressful feelings of overwhelm, it could cause you to resist the process and quit before you start. Before you build that complete inventory of unfinished commitments - or what David Allen refers to as the “open loops” of our life, we’ll need to develop the tools to organize, manage and complete commitments.
In the February, 2025 newsletter issue, we will examine the nature of our commitments, and how to organize them in a way that leads to completion.
Until then, all the best for a happy and productive start to 2025
Regards,
Peter Gallant