The Total Capture Productivity Letters:System Implementation: Getting Started in 20 Minutes

Issue 4: May, 2025

Welcome to the Issue #4 of the Total Capture Productivity Letters!

If you are a new reader, you can read prior issues here: 

https://www.drpetergallant.com/

By way of a quick recap - many thought leaders in the productivity and “self-management” space advocate the idea of capturing every commitment - big and small, personal and professional, at every level and time horizon in written form in a place outside your brain.

The intent behind this is simple: to relieve your mind from the job of remembering the (likely large and possibly even scary) number of commitments that all of us have made across the entirety of our personal and professional lives, in order to free up our “cognitive bandwidth” to focus on actually completing commitments with a new level of mental clarity at our disposal.

This sounds great, doesn’t it?  Sure.

At least in theory.

Implementation is the True Challenge

Implementation is the tricky part.  Not only is it rare in my experience to encounter someone who has truly captured everything they are responsible for in some external form - either written or in one of the large number of apps designed for this purpose - the challenge is then keeping this inventory of commitments current and up-to-date as new commitments appear throughout any given day, and other commitments are either completed or advanced to another stage.

It’s important to remember that getting to a level of “complete and current” is an important long-term milestone in implementing your productivity system, but it is not a great short-term goal to aim for.   

Let’s not start out the journey with an untenable goal, as this is not going to be helpful.

Your initial list of commitments will be far from complete, so let’s not aim for completeness from Day One.

You will likely not be able to consistently capture new commitments, nor will you always automatically refer to your system to identify which commitment to focus on next throughout your day, especially if you are busy or distracted - and this will cause your system to rapidly become “non-current”.

These issues are completely normal at the beginning.  Normal!

Don’t be discouraged: currency and completeness of your system will come over time as you develop your own personal repertoire of habits and behaviours that form your own unique, systematic approach.

Don’t aim for perfection.  Just get started.

Don’t overthink it.  Just get started.

Don’t spend an hour researching productivity apps online or reading article after article about productivity (except this newsletter series, of course!).  Just get started.

Getting Off the Dime: How to Get Started in 20 Minutes

The absolutely simplest, lowest-resistance method of getting started is to find 20 minutes in your schedule when you are feeling well-rested and relaxed in a quiet, distraction-free environment with a blank piece of paper and a pen that you enjoy writing with.

You may be tempted to use a smartphone app or computer, but I don’t recommend this for this initial exercise - it’s too easy to get distracted with a connected device. You can always “go digital” later.

Prepare your page by writing a column of numbers from 1 to 10 to create a blank list for 10 items. 

Over the next 20 minutes, relax and clear your mind and think about things you need to do that are “on your radar”.  Immediately write down whatever comes to mind - big or small, personal or professional - things you need to do today or a year from now, it doesn’t matter.  

Continue doing this until you have a list of 10 items in front of you.  No more, no less - just 10 items.  When you reach 10 items, stop for now.  While it may be tempting to do a full “brain dump” of every commitment that you can think of - that will come later.

Side note: attempting to add every single commitment you can think of to this list right now can actually hinder your progress.  Staring at a list of 100 or more incomplete commitments - which is still likely to be an incomplete list in itself - will only lead to unnecessary stress and a feeling overwhelm right from the beginning.  If a couple of extra items pop into your mind, then fine - add them to the list, but then stop there for now.

Visualize a Path to Completion

For each commitment - think about the path to completion - the specific actions that you would have to take to get this item over the finish line and off your list.

For some items on your list - you may only need to take a single action - sending a quick email or making a quick phone call to complete the item.  Other items may require some deeper thinking, or can only be completed in a specific location, such as your home or office, or involve other people.

For now, it may be useful to annotate each item with some of this information - but the main point is that our commitments can have significantly different levels of complexity, depth of thought, time, or other resource requirements in order to complete them, and recognizing and dealing with this difference in an effective way will be a critical part of developing your total capture productivity system in the future - stay tuned!

What Commitments Attract or Repel You?

Another quick but useful exercise is to scan through your short list of commitments and notice what you feel about each commitment on the list: does it attract you or repel you?   

Are you genuinely interested and excited to tackle this item on your list, or does it inspire the opposite feelings?

This will provide some potentially useful clues for designing your productivity system in the future.

Start to Work With Your List Immediately

While your short, 10-item commitment list obviously does not capture even a fraction of the commitments we have made and what we are responsible for in our lives, it is a useful starting point to begin thinking in terms of making and managing commitments, not time.

If possible - before you even stand up from making your list, pick one simple item and complete it.  Make that quick call, send that short email, or jot down some thoughts on how to tackle a more complex item on your list.

The act of checking off an item, or even making some meaningful forward progress on something on your list is a “win” - enjoy the feeling!

If you completed an item, consider adding another item to replace it.

Carry this list around with you for the rest of the day - add any new commitments that you make throughout the day, check off any items that you are able to complete during the day if you have time to do any of them.

If possible, schedule an appointment with yourself in your calendar for you to sit down and review this list.  How many commitments from the original list were you able to complete?  Did you add any new items?  Are all of the items still relevant to you?

This is Just the Beginning

This quick, 20-minute exercise has hopefully got you thinking about just a few of your commitments, visualizing a path to completion, and beginning to notice how you feel about the commitments that you have already made.

Imagine doing this with everything.

That’s Total Capture Productivity.

We’ll be taking a closer look at the commitments on your list in the next issue of this newsletter. 

Until then: try to notice how often you make a commitment - any commitment, big or small, personal and professional, throughout your day!