A Boy and His Inbaskets
As it should be obvious by now, I am Manning’s productivity nerd. I am a lay member of the cult of Getting Things Done. I wanted to offer up a brief observation from my day-to-day work. Like the GTD project planning model, the GTD system consists of five discrete steps:
- Capture everything that you can possible think of
- Process those thoughts into physical actions
- Organize those actions in to contextual lists (Things that can only be done at work, or require an internet connection)
- Review lists and grab the actions that make sense for your context, time, energy
- Do the best action
Like any system, it is only as good as the weakest link. If you stop processing all your random thoughts, you will begin to realize that your lists are out of date and then you will stop trusting your system.
For me the key to staying current on my system is making sure I capture everything. The rule for capture is this: have as many capture tools as you need, but as few as you can get by on. The best way for me to accomplish this is to always have a pad of paper and pen at hand, but ideally, it will be the same pad every time. As the number of places that things are collected expands, the number of places you will have to process from later. Something that is not processed in a timely manner has no more value than if it was never captured.
