The Bench is an AI-native to-do list. Most to-do lists organize your work. This one prioritizes it, and does the parts a machine can do.
David Allen’s Getting Things Done was right about the mind: it’s for having ideas, not holding them. But it was built for the tools of 2001, and most of its rules exist to save you from clerical work that a system can now do for you.
Allen's five steps are still the right five steps. What changed is who does each one, and how much of it is clerical.
Have as many inboxes as you need and as few as you can get by with. Every one is a place you have to go and empty.
Inboxes are free.Talk, type, forward, toss. Every surface lands in the same place on its own, so have as many as your day needs.
Pick up each item, one at a time. Ask what it is, and what the next action is.
You judge. You don't process.Claude asks that question first and brings you an answer. You say yes, no, or someday. You keep the judgment and drop the paperwork.
Maintain your lists: projects, next actions, waiting for, someday. If the lists rot, the system rots.
Lists are views.Board, week, month, kanban, all drawn from one set of records. All the views. None of the upkeep.
Sort actions by context: @phone, @computer, @errands. Your tools lived in places.
The context is who does it.Your tools live in your pocket. What matters is whether it's yours, Claude's, or someone else's move.
Do the weekly review. The system only gets smarter when you sit down and reflect.
A learning loop.It learns which work actually helped, and asks you once a week. You rule on what it found.Also built: learning how long things really take, and whose move it really is. Paused while we tune them.
Check your Waiting For list, and remember to chase.
It knows whose move it is.It flags what's gone quiet. The follow-up is one press away.Built, and paused while we tune it.
Track what you're going to do.
Count what you did, too.Work that never touched a list still happened. An evening sweep finds it and asks if it counts.Built, and paused while we tune it.
If it takes less than two minutes, do it now.
Start halfway done.The draft, the research, the first pass are waiting before you open the task.
The system's job ends at telling you the next action. The doing is all you.
The system does part of the work.It drafts, looks up and prepares. Nothing leaves without your press.
GTD only learned when you sat down for the weekly review. This one notices as you work. It watches how work actually moves through your week, asks you for nothing extra, and once a week hands you the pattern in plain words.
Prepped work sits three days before you open it. The bottleneck is the read, not the draft.
11 drafts written, 7 sent. Four have sat more than a week.
Almost everything came in by voice. The email inbox carried two things all month.
You accepted 1 of 14 suggestions from meeting notes. Turn that source off?
You worked the top pick 2 days out of 5. You keep reaching for client work first.
Three things closed this week that moved your top goal. Everything else was upkeep.
It doesn’t change its own rules. It shows you what it saw, and you decide what changes.
Skip the weekly review for a month and the lists go stale. You stop trusting them. You're back to holding it all in your head.
It does something you didn't ask for, quietly, in a place you don't look. Or it hands every decision back to you for a tap, until the help turns into homework. Either way you stop trusting it, and you're back to holding it all in your head.
I learned that the hard way. The first version of this system broke eighteen different ways.
Almost every one started the same way: two things writing to the same place.
Here’s how we solved for it.
Nothing joins your list without your yes.
One email when there's news. A log you can read.
The system can read what you decided. It can't change it.
Try this. For one week, count the minutes you spend moving words from one place to another. Notebook to list. Email to task. Sticky note to calendar.
That's the tax GTD asked you to pay.
It's optional now.
or email robert@richman.la