Inboxes and Capture

[garce]

I noticed a lot of things were falling through the cracks for me. After some noodling realize I had several inboxes and forgetting to review them. I made this list on a post it note and stuck it to my monitor. I work with clients and have to have more inboxes than normal (some clients give me access to their collab tools). So every morning I do my processing by going from top to bottom as a checklist of what to review

1. Post it notes (I may write misc stuff there)
2. Physical notebook
3. Onenote notes
4. My Company Slack activity (ie anything that I may have been mentioned)
5. My Company Microsot Teams activity (ie anything that I may have been mentioned)
6. My Company email client inbox
7. My clients Microsoft Teams activity
8. My clients email client inbox
9. My calendar
10. To Dos

This helped for sure. I wanted to share maybe others have better ways?

 

[ivanjay205]

I noticed a lot of things were falling through the cracks for me. After some noodling realize I had several inboxes and forgetting to review them. I made this list on a post it note and stuck it to my monitor. I work with clients and have to have more inboxes than normal (some clients give me access to their collab tools). So every morning I do my processing by going from top to bottom as a checklist of what to review

1. Post it notes (I may write misc stuff there)
2. Physical notebook
3. Onenote notes
4. My Company Slack activity (ie anything that I may have been mentioned)
5. My Company Microsot Teams activity (ie anything that I may have been mentioned)
6. My Company email client inbox
7. My clients Microsoft Teams activity
8. My clients email client inbox
9. My calendar
10. To Dos

This helped for sure. I wanted to share maybe others have better ways?

I literally have a daily and startup routine that instead of saying Clarify Inbox it says list every single one. For example clarifying teams takes all of 1-2 minutes for me but by having that note there it helps me to focus in on it. This helps me tremendously so I have a checklist of where to check.

 

[mcogilvie]

IMHO, 10 places to look is still a lot of places to treat as inboxes. There are a lot of apps which act like intermediate inboxes, and a lot of people who have too many places to track.

 

[bishblaize]

I think a daily checklist that includes checking your inboxes is essential.

I don't think there's a problem with having lots of inboxes, within reason. Most inboxes comes from having multiple channels of communication. In my case that includes Teams, email, WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn, Twitter DMs and iMessage. (I use a shortcut to open them all at once, which helps).

Other than channels of communication, I have my task manager, Drafts, DevonThink and our HR system. So not too many others.

 

[mcogilvie]

I think a daily checklist that includes checking your inboxes is essential.

I don't think there's a problem with having lots of inboxes, within reason. Most inboxes comes from having multiple channels of communication. In my case that includes Teams, email, WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn, Twitter DMs and iMessage. (I use a shortcut to open them all at once, which helps).

Other than channels of communication, I have my task manager, Drafts, DevonThink and our HR system. So not too many others

would you mind describing briefly how you use Drafts?

 

[bishblaize]

would you mind describing briefly how you use Drafts?

From a GTD perspective, its basically a digital version of the A5 spiral notepad that I used to carry back in the day. Everything goes in it, then I process it back out again into its eventual home. Stuff like meeting notes, research notes while I'm online, a space to grab a phone number, a list of questions to that it occurs to me to ask in a meeting, and so on. I've never found a quicker app to get into and start writing, both on phone and PC.

The thing that makes it efficient is the processing. I won't go into the geeky details, but essentially i can process all my drafts in one go via automation. I run the script and the tasks go into my task manager, someday-maybes go into that list, meeting notes get put into my reference folder, and so on. You can do this on several or all of your Drafts in a single pass, so I can process a day of notes in a few seconds.

Outside of GTD it has some other uses. Its a good text editor so I write most of my copy in there before sending it to other apps. It also has great chatgpt integration, so I use it for my AI conversations.