A huge part of my early GTD practice was “capturing” things into temporary holding places like a voice memo, a pocket notebook, and a desk tray. All those are called inboxes and collectively they’re also “the inbox”.
Then during a “review process” it’s time go through and sort it into where it belongs (for example writing something on the “to do at home” list). That’s called “processing”.
And getting good at GTD means getting good at sorting the inbox out.
But since I switched back to paper in 2023 my new approach is to skip that extra capture layer and instead write things where they go directly.
This is heresy in GTD because one of the tenets is to more crisply distinguish between “capturing”, “clarifying”, “organizing”, “reflecting”, and “engaging”. (Or “collecting”, “processing”, “organizing”, “reviewing” and “doing” if you have the first edition.)
If I let things straight onto my lists willy nilly, that can get messy quickly. Not everything deserves to go on there.
A lot of our inputs are already mediated by inboxes, like email or issue trackers. I don’t need to create an extra layer of capture, then parse, then re-enter, then erase.
Maybe I’m dating myself by saying “these days”. That’s 90s style. Modern-day apps don’t have inboxes anymore, they’re just a constant barrage of notifications and info. But you can see those notifications as being in an inbox-of-sorts on the OS level.
So these “external” inboxes are a great opportunity to apply all that GTD care. If the world is kind enough to serve up everything into an inbox for us then we can batch them (after setting it up so that urgent things get through) and look over them, clarify them and organize them.
If having to schlep my calendar around with me all the time sounds like it’s the biggest drawback of the inbox-begone approach, don’t worry. I can still capture the occasional note and I do make sure to review them when I get home. I use a purse so it’s often pretty easy for me to have my calendar but it’s great to have the option to go a li’l lighter sometimes, which I do.
Another reason to do capturing is when you’re really overwhelmed and an interruption comes in that you want to note. You don’t have time to process it now so you note it and move on. This kind of capturing I now do way less of. I feel (maybe I’m kidding myself) that I’ve gotten to the point that putting the new thing in action form on the “@screen” list or “@home” list is just as easy. Although, I do pretty often put things on the wrong list so maybe I do need to reconsider my approach a little.😅
I still take the time to go through the context lists and X things out. After doing traditional capture-first-process-later GTD for so long (twenty years now), I’ve become pretty good at guessing right away whether or not something actually belongs on the list or if I should just shrug it off right away, but if mistakes do happen it’s just an X away.
One of the core dialectic tensions in productivity is little-and-often vs batching. Batching is more efficient but it can get to be too much.
Sorting a huge inbox was an incredibly hard challenge for me when I started GTD and it’s been for everyone I taught it to IRL. While does get much, much easier with practice, it’s never going to be completely “free”. It’s always going to be one decision after another and that’s going to be mentally exhausting and totally dreaded.
I’ve de-emphasized weekly reviews in my posts because the review is usually what trips people up. But the point of the review is to make sure your lists are current and that every project has a next step (or is done… or officially abandoned). That’s something you’re gonna have to do eventually and hard enough even if you don’t have a massive inbox waiting for you every week.
That’s why my approach is to bypass capturing and not use a “personal inbox” as much. (By “personal inbox” I mean an inbox for ourselves that we fill ourselves, as opposed to an external inbox.)
I might’ve said before that the bad habit to bypass the capture step and instead write things directly onto project list and next actions list has the drawback that it can lead to letting too much things into your life and leading to overwhelm and that warning still holds so you need to be super vigilant about what you write in there when you add it, and also still be ready to give up on projects and remove them. But if you promise you can do that, the “bad” habit is a heck of a lot less “bad” than letting a bunch of unmade decisions pile up in a huge inbox.
Tossing stuff into your inbox is an amazing tool when you’re overwhelmed so doing it “as little as possible” does not mean “never”. It’s like magic to me that the scribbled note at a party or quick memo when I was super busy, that I can salvage that and turn that into a life-saving stitch in time to save nine once I finally get around to processing that inbox. Jamming stuff into the inbox TBD later is a necessity as a quicksave that lets you fully focus on your work, your art, the people around you. But doing it too much creates “decision debt”, it’s like the GTD equivalent of skipping sleep.
Mind like water still takes time and effort. For some tasks, there’s value in batching things and doing a bunch of them at once once you’re in that particular flow. For some people who aren’t as decision fatiguable as I am, inbox review might be one of those task, and an end-of-day sweep of an inbox they’ve tossed vague junk into all day might be the most efficient and best use of their time. But for me it’s having to move a mountain all at once. I’d rather try my best to keep the inbox as empty as possible before it stacks up, while still acknowledging that sometimes life happens and the inbox piling up is going to be a good thing, a caretaker of all the yan, tan, and tethera of your life while you’re under the ice.
Having to sort through a huge inbox is an inescapable part of GTD, I’m not denying that. When you first bootstrap GTD, or when you’re returning to it after having fallen off, or when your life circumstances drastically change and turn everything upside down. I could try to sell you some other productivity method that didn’t do that but I honestly don’t think that would make your life any simpler or better. Reviewing the inbox is core to GTD. I’m just saying I’m trying to do it as little as possible by “bypassing” the inbox when I can; as long as I’m making conscious and deliberate decisions about what goes on my lists.