u/Brainnew222

so I posted this in r/gtd last week because I assumed everyone had the same hole I do. got three pretty detailed replies and honestly they kind of dismantled my assumption

one guy said he only bothers updating source notes when its a shared document. if hes the only reader, a stale note costs him nothing. which, fair, I hadnt thought of it that way

another one has this habit of putting the notify-target inside the action itself, like "@MikeSmith: deploy to the testing stand". he also admitted he skips weekly reviews a lot and catches up the next week. that one felt very familiar

third one marks the original note when he pulls items out of it, but when I asked, the mark means "this got extracted" not "this got done". took me a second to realise those are diffrent things

so the pattern I think im seeing: nobody writes completion back to where the commitment was originally made. but also nobody seems particularly bothered by it. everyone built a workaround years ago and stopped feeling the cost

which leaves me stuck. is this a real gap or did I just fail to build the workaround everyone else built

genuine question for this sub — when someone says "ill send you the numbers by friday" in a meeting, where does that actually live until friday? and how do you find out when it doesnt happen. do you chase, or do you just quietly absorb it

the ones I never chase are the ones I never find out about, which is sort of the whole problem

GTD got capture right decades ago — ubiquitous capture, trusted inbox, get it out of your head. That part of my system works.

Here's what doesn't: the loop between "captured" and "verifiably done."

When I complete a task, the task manager knows. But the meeting note where that commitment was made never finds out. The project reference material still describes the old plan. Three weeks later I re-read a note, see "waiting on budget approval," and have no idea if that's still true. My reference system describes intentions frozen at the moment of capture.

David Allen talks about the weekly review as the mechanism that keeps the system honest. In practice my review catches maybe half of these drifts, because reviewing means re-deciding hundreds of items from memory.

Questions for people whose systems have survived years:

1. Do you update source notes when a commitment closes, or do you treat notes as disposable capture debris?

2. Does anyone track commitments *other people* made to you? "Waiting for" lists exist in GTD, but mine rots faster than any other list.

3. Is the weekly review actually enough, or have you built something more automatic?

Genuinely asking — I've been experimenting with automating the write-back part for my own use and I can't tell if this is a real gap in GTD practice or just my own sloppiness.