The GTD horizons of focus
GTD is famous for its bottom half — capture, next actions, the weekly tidy-up. But David Allen’s book has an upper half too, and almost everyone skips it. It’s the part that asks what all this doing is for.
A tidy list can still point the wrong way.
The inbox is empty, every project has a next action, the weekly review is done, and something still nags. The nag this time is not “I’m forgetting something” but “I’m not sure any of this matters.” A well-kept list tells you what you could do next and says nothing about whether you should be doing it at all.
That question has a place in GTD. Allen calls the levels horizons of focus, and in the original 2001 book he described them as altitudes — you’re on the runway looking at the next physical step, or at 50,000 feet looking at your whole life. The 2015 revision renumbers them as Ground plus Horizons 1 through 5. Same six levels either way.
The six levels, in plain words.
Read them from the bottom up. Each one is a different distance from the ground, and each answers a different question.
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Ground · Next actions
The runway. The very next physical thing you could do — “call the plumber”, “email Sam the draft”. This is where almost all task apps live, and where all real work happens.
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Horizon 1 · Projects
Anything that takes more than one step to finish: repaint the hallway, hire a designer, get the passport renewed. Roughly 10,000 feet — close enough to still see the actions underneath.
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Horizon 2 · Areas of focus
The ongoing parts of your life that never get “finished”: health, money, your team, your marriage. They don’t have a done date; they have a standard you’re trying to hold. About 20,000 feet.
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Horizon 3 · Goals
What you want true in one to two years. “Ship the book.” “Be out of debt.” Goals are the first level with a finish line far enough away that you can drift off course for months without noticing. 30,000 feet.
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Horizon 4 · Vision
Three to five years out: what kind of work you’re doing, where you live, who you’re doing it with. A picture rather than a plan. 40,000 feet, where individual projects are no longer visible.
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Horizon 5 · Purpose and principles
Why any of it. What you’re here to do, and the lines you won’t cross getting there. 50,000 feet. Most people visit this level a handful of times in a lifetime, usually after something changes.
Why apps are bad at the top three.
The obvious feature request is: give me goal objects and vision objects, let me link goals to projects, and show me the tree. It sounds right. In practice it adds machinery rather than clarity. You get two more list types to keep tidy, a linking step on every new project, and a satisfying diagram that is out of date within a month — because life doesn’t reorganize itself when you rename a goal.
The honest version is less impressive: the top three horizons aren’t a data structure, they’re a conversation you have with yourself on a schedule. Hard-linking a goal to fourteen tasks doesn’t make you pursue it. Sitting down and noticing you’ve neglected it does.
A document and a repeating task.
A plain document does the job: goals on one page, vision on another, kept outside the task system entirely. Then the part that does the real work, a repeating task to go read them. A GTD user writing under the handle linuxluser described their setup on the Mindwtr discussion board — a monthly repeating task “Review L3 goals”, a six-monthly one “Review L4 visions”, both tagged with an @focus context meaning real, undistracted time. An hour on a weekend. Some months they delete the task and skip it.
in GTD, it’s the review process itself that is important. … It’s your life that links things together.
— linuxluser, on the Mindwtr discussion board
Their other useful detail is what a review produces: a verdict, one per goal, rather than a batch of new tasks. Meeting it, could do better, neglecting it, or time to renegotiate it. That last one is the most valuable and the least used. Dropping a goal you no longer want is a result, not a failure.
Setting this up in Mindwtr.
Mindwtr models the bottom three horizons directly: next actions, projects, and Areas for your ongoing responsibilities. For goals and vision there’s no special object, on purpose — you keep a “Goals” area or a reference list, and link to those notes from the projects that serve them.
Then build the habit the same way linuxluser does. Make a repeating task for the monthly goals pass and another for the twice-yearly vision pass, and give both a context like @focus so they never show up in the ten-minutes-before-a-meeting list. The guided Weekly Review is where they surface. The full mapping is written up in the horizons FAQ entry.
Mindwtr is free and open source under AGPL-3.0, with no account and nothing stored anywhere but your own device. It won’t tell you what your life is for. It will make sure the question comes back around every month.
Keep reading
New to the method? Start with what GTD is — the five habits in five minutes. The Mindwtr Handbook walks through the whole system in practice, and the psychology of GTD covers why getting things out of your head works in the first place.