David Allen

Author of “Getting Things Done” (2001), discussed in How to Take Smart Notes as the source of the “great insight” that collecting everything needing attention into one place and processing it in a standardized way produces a “mind like water” — the state of focusing on the task in front of you without competing thoughts nagging at working memory. The book also argues GTD can’t be directly transferred to insight-driven writing, since GTD relies on clearly defined objectives while writing that aims at insight starts vague and can’t be broken into fixed next-steps the way GTD requires.

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes
• Write Things Down — Ben Thompson credits Allen (via Merlin Mann’s 43folders) as the intellectual origin of his own writing practice and uses GTD’s RAM metaphor as the frame for how LLMs externalize working memory.