- A system must be reliable to be useful
- Must have all of the things you care about
- Must have none of the things you don't about
- Our brains are great at coming up with ideas and remembering things but generally do so at the wrong time or in the wrong place
- CAPTURE everything into a small number of inboxes
- PROCESS these captured ideas into either:
- ACTIONS: concrete, single step, obvious actions
- REFERENCE: material that you can readily find when you need it
- TRASH: for all the things you don't need
Inboxes are on the border of the system, and represent a staging area of "stuff". I have an OmniFocus inbox, an email inbox, and a physical in tray.
"Processing" turns the items in inboxes into things in the system. It is not the same as doing everything in the inbox.
For each item in the inbox:
- what is it?
- is it actionable?
- is it multi-step?
- what's the outcome?
- => outcome becomes a new "Project"
- => steps become actions in that project
- is it single step?
- will it take less than 2 minutes? do it now (overhead of organizing too high)
- does it have to be done at a time & place? put it on the calendar
- can I get someone else to do it? delegate it and add an item to your "waiting" list
- otherwise, add an action:
- be as concrete as possible
- "do taxes" is bad, "go to Tax Office on 12 Murray St to pick up P22 form" is good
- tag with "contexts" -- essentially a label for the circumstance when you can do it. (e.g. "errands", "online", "home")
- No?
- Trash it
- Incubate it (defer it until later)
- Reference material (put it somewhere so that you can find it when you need it)
- Only add the things that you must do at a particular time and place. This pretty much means appointments
- OK to have a separate calendar with "informational" stuff that doesn't require a specific action (e.g. due dates, school holidays, etc.)
Everything that's on your mind, or is emailed to you, or gets asked of you in conversations, or that reminds you of a thing that you need to do is "stuff".
"Stuff" isn't actionable or completable. It's just stuff.
"Do taxes" is stuff. "Toothpaste" is stuff.
You want a system where it's super easy to capture stuff without having to think too hard about how to organize it. These phases need to be decoupled.