CONCEPT
The Capture Discipline
The first stage of GTD — the comprehensive externalization of every uncommitted commitment from the mind into a trusted collection system — and the stage whose structural assumption AI has most directly undermined.
Capture is the foundational discipline of Getting Things Done: the commitment to externalize every open loop, without exception, into a container the mind can trust. Nothing is too small, too vague, too ambitious, or too uncertain to capture. The system works only if it is comprehensive, because the mind cannot achieve mind like water if it suspects anything has been left uncollected. For twenty-five years, the capture discipline operated on a reliable structural assumption: that there is a gap between having an idea and acting on it, and that capture's function is to bridge that gap. AI has collapsed the gap for a significant class of work, converting capture from a necessary bridge into a chosen delay — and changing the discipline's meaning fundamentally.
In The You On AI Field Guide
In Allen's original framework, capture was conceived as a technical discipline: the mechanics of jotting, recording, collecting. The medium did not matter — notebook, voice memo, inbox, whiteboard —