Guide to GTD: Collecting

The GTD process starts with collecting stuff.  Stuff includes:

• stuff that could be useful in the future
  
• stuff that imply a task or action
  
• stuff that needs your attention
  

The goal is to make sure all your stuff is consolidated in as few locations as you can.

Collecting in the real world
For actual papers, bills, letters, and other stuff in the real world, I just simply dump them all into an physical tray. This is where everything goes.

The other collection point is my notebook where my ideas and notes are stored. I take my notes in a report pad that has pages with the Cornell Method layout. As you can see in the photo below, each page is separated into three sections: 1) note area, 2) key word area on the left column, and 3) summary area on the bottom.


If you can’t find a notebook in this layout and would like to try this layout, here’s a web tool where you can create and print your own.


For the digital world, it gets complicated
Unlike the real world, ironically, the digital world is not that simple. I’d wish I could have one inbox on my computer where I can dump everything and view them efficiently later, but I haven’t found a great solution like that.

In the digital world, stuff have types, and we manage our stuff in different software. Emails in email software. Notes in note-taking software. Documents in our file system. Tasks in our task management software.

I’m still looking for that perfect solution that lets me view and manage emails, notes, and documents all in one centralized location.  I think Midnight Inbox is pretty close to getting it right.  There are lots of great GTD software out there, and I'm sure we'll see something that ties everything together nicely.  

For now my digital setup is:

• Inbox on the file system (Mac)
  
• Inbox on Things (Mac and iPhone)
  
• Inbox in Mail (Mac and iPhone)
  

Taking notes on the iPhone
For now, I’m trying to use Things, a task management software,  to capture notes. I actually prefer the Notes application on iPhone because of its simplicity and fast loading time. However, that would increase my collection point to two on the iPhone, so for now, I’m going to try to use Things to capture notes and tasks.

Evernote, a really cool software, is worth mentioning. It allows you to capture notes and sync them across computers and devices. After testing it out for a month or so, unfortunately, I’m deciding to leave it our of my set up. My reasons are:

• the iPhone app takes a while to load
  
• it becomes an additional collection point
  
• it stores data and stuff on servers, and there are some business docs and data that I’m not comfortable of putting in the clouds

However, I think it’s a really useful software, and it might work for you.

Collecting stuff on Mac
Mails are collected in the Mail application on my Mac. Files such as documents, presentations, and bookmarks are all dumped into an Inbox folder. Actions and tasks are captured through Things.

Taking notes on Mac
Currently, I’m not using a single software to capture notes. There are several ways I refer to for taking notes:

• sending myself notes via email, which will end up in the email Inbox
  
• writing up a note in TextEdit, Pages, or Word, and putting them in the Inbox folder
  
• notes that should be viewed frequently or notes that could suggest a future task are usually done in Together, and putting them in the right place / category at that moment (I will discuss how Together fits into my setup in a future post)

Sub-collection points
Lastly, I'd like to talk about sub-collection points, which is a terminology that I made up. These are places that just accumulate stuff. For me, these are:

On my Mac:

• Desktop (out of habit, though I try to drop everything into the Inbox, files just accumuluate here)
  

Real World:

• wallet - receipts pile up here
  
• business card holder - business cards of contacts pile up here
  

They key is to make sure to have the sub-collection points processed or dumped into main collection points (i.e., inboxes) on a regular basis. If sub-collection points aren’t consolidated, that prevents you from collecting everything and creating a loophole, which means you may forget something or some task. To make sure you do this, you will need a system for recurring/repeating tasks to make sure you do this. This will be covered in a later post, of course.

Takeaway points
Hopefully the above gives you some idea on how you can approach setting up a system to collect stuff. No matter what system you use, just make sure the system can consolidate everything into a few centralized places.  

In the next post, I will be talking about setting up a reference system, and following that, I will talk about how I'm processing all this stuff I'm collecting.

That’s all for collecting. Hope you find it helpful and thanks for reading!