Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a system for getting organised and staying productive. It may seem complicated on the outside, but the end goal is to spend less time doing the things you have to do so you have more time for the things you want to do. Let's break it down and see how you can apply a simplified version to your life.

Here is how many of us make our daily to-do lists: In the AM, fuelled by coffee and morning delusion, we jot down all the tasks we hope to accomplish in the next eight (or, let's be real, 11 or 12) hours. But these lists, while well-intentioned, are often written haphazardly.

I typically start every work day by creating a list of the things I need to accomplish that day. Once something I did in the Notes app, I eventually moved to just using a page in a notebook. As new things pop up I add to that list, ultimately ending in a jumbled mess of a list with things crossed off and others written in the margins and inevitably that one thing that accidentally slips through the cracks.

I have a bad to-do habit. I make big ambitious lists of things I want to do, then let them pile up in my to-do app until I'm so scared that I quit the app and start a new one. But I've found a way out of my to-do debt.

Google Tasks has been around for nearly 10 years. While digital to-do lists are great for keeping yourself organised, Google's attempt always felt like a half-effort. With no official mobile app, you had to turn to a third-party app to access your tasks from your smartphone or tablet, or you had to pull up the mobile version of Gmail on your favourite browser - as if.

A few years ago I discovered Trello, and how I organise things hasn't been the same since. If you're not familiar, Trello is a digital tool that essentially allows you to create lists of items, where each item is an individual card. This week I came across another service that caught my attention with a similar look: Sunsama. It's a calendar app built to look and feel like Trello, and I'm pretty stoked on it.

Your to-do management system says a lot, maybe everything, about you. We've organised the major systems according to their Dungeons and Dragons alignments, making value judgments with which no sane person could ever disagree.

As we have argued in the past, email is not the problem - we are. And it's not just the productivity drain or the antisocial effects of constantly checking our phones and computers for new messages.

There are psychological ramifications too. By constantly looking for new information and tasks from other people, we are degrading the importance of the things we want and need to do. This flowchart explains what you're doing wrong - and how to fix it.

Email can be a distracting time sink for any office worker. But sometimes, it's best to get it out of the way. Over at Harvard Business Review, contributor Dorie Clark makes the case for checking email first thing in the morning.

Do you always install your air conditioner on a sweltering summer day, or rush to do your taxes days before the deadline? For absolutely necessary tasks like these, a to-do list isn't always enough. You need to block out time on your calendar, and treat these tasks like actual appointments. We've listed all the best to-do items to turn into calendar items.

There are some excellent time-tracking apps out there, but if you prefer the comfort of good old Microsoft Excel, here's some good news. A Redditor made an Excel-based to-do list with built-in time tracking, and the template is free to download.

When it's time to buckle down and get some serious work done, we trust that you have a go-to productivity method or technique that functions best for your workflow. At Lifehacker, we talk a lot about the different techniques you can use to spend more time doing, and less time organising or thinking about doing. If your current method is working for you, here are five productivity techniques that have proven highly effective for countless people.

Your Mac comes packed with a perfectly fine calendar app, but it's lacking advanced features, multiple ways to view your calendar and external service integration. For all that and more, we like Fantastical.

As more of us are working remotely these days, more digital task managers are offering collaborative features like sharing specific tasks, commenting on tasks and making shared to-do lists within your team.

Regardless which productivity system or method you prefer, Zenkit is an all-in-one webapp that can help you manage your big projects and activities using the system that works for you. It's free (for now, it's in beta), but it looks good -- minimal and distraction-free, but powerful under the hood.

Chrome/iOS: Handle is the productivity add-on that Google should have made. It seamlessly combines emails, to-do lists and calendars to make Gmail your central productivity hub.

When you get emails that require action, you want to make sure to add it to your task list as soon as you can, and the best way to do this is to connect that list to your email. This way, you can add to your to-do list without leaving your inbox.

Android/iPhone: TickTick is a powerful syncing to-do manager that's seen a lot of improvement since its launch. Today, it's getting a handful of new features.

There's a solid case to be made for going public with your goals. You can use the same method with your to-do list, and beyond the accountability factor, writing your list for someone else can help you make it more succinct and efficient.