Keeping inbox notes?

Annecobbscott

Registered
I’ve been using the GTD method for a couple months now for business and personal. I have been very happy with my progress in implementing the system into my daily life. I am currently using pen and paper.

My question is this… once I capture and clarify, I find myself keeping my sheets because I am afraid I am going to miss something from there. I also find myself thinking that it’s my way of keeping track of my daily progress.

Has anyone else kept their capture/clarify notes? I don’t necessarily want to keep them because I waste time going back and re-reading them daily.

I appreciate your input and thoughts. TIA
 

schmeggahead

Registered
My experience with GTD is that if I have an undefined reason for keeping something, I get a clogged system and baggage in my head about the things I am keeping just in case. I either put them in reference (labeled), incubate(a specific time period) or trash. Creating a folder for old capture/clarify sheets sounds more like a journal entry. I process my journal entries to ensure nothing is actionable.

I also keep my completed project control sheets for a period of time after they are finished for a specific purpose.
I like to see how thick the deck gets before culling and the time period those sheets reflect.

A practice I started about a year ago: I look at the clarify sheet and copy any information that I feel I need to retain and organize it into my system. I make a conscious decision to continue to work the sheet until it is entirely redundant or irrelevant. Then it safely goes into my shred/recycle bin (it queues up there until the bin is full).

My projects worked better after that. I really understood what was on the capture/clarify notes enough to organize them into trash/project support/reference/etc. I wasn't reprocessing my capture/clarify sheets when working on the project.

My clarify is on paper 90% of the time (sometimes on reMarkable) so I have the physical page to cross off as the information is organized.

If I don't complete the process, the capture/clarify notes go into my tickler for a few days to a week when I might have a clearer head about what was pressing me to keep it.

Thanks,
Clayton.

You may have just had a near life experience. - Tyler Durdan.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
Sure, everyone keeps stuff, for lots of reasons. If it’s related to a project, it can be an easy thing to relegate it to project support. Sometimes we’re not quite sure we’ve got all the information, or we’re not confident everyone involved thinks we’re done. Whatever the reason, you can always put it in a “hold and then pitch after a certain interval” system. I do this with certain kinds of email, but the same principles apply to paper. It’s mostly a security blanket for me, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
 

Jared Caron

Nursing leader; GTD enthusiast
I’ve been using the GTD method for a couple months now for business and personal. I have been very happy with my progress in implementing the system into my daily life. I am currently using pen and paper.

My question is this… once I capture and clarify, I find myself keeping my sheets because I am afraid I am going to miss something from there. I also find myself thinking that it’s my way of keeping track of my daily progress.

Has anyone else kept their capture/clarify notes? I don’t necessarily want to keep them because I waste time going back and re-reading them daily.

I appreciate your input and thoughts. TIA
The ultimate GTD answer… it depends what it is. Hence the keystone step for GTD is clarifying precisely what those notes are and the value of keeping, also where to keep them. I will sometimes retain handwritten notes from meetings or brainstorming and either stick them in a physical project folder or scan them to project files if they could serve as useful reference. If I need them for some later action such as writing an email or report, or for a phone call, they might go into an action support folder.
My instinct is that If you find yourself reviewing them again every day there’s probably something in there you haven’t quite clarified yet. While clarifying anything detailed like meeting notes I use a yellow highlighter to strike things out as I clarify them, since there’s often multiple things to extract. Remember that capture is about speed and facility; clarify is about precision and completeness.
 

Murray

Registered
While clarifying anything detailed like meeting notes I use a yellow highlighter to strike things out as I clarify them, since there’s often multiple things to extract.
Same, except I use a grey highlighter for this. I call it my lowlighter.
 

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Gardener

Registered
I’ve been using the GTD method for a couple months now for business and personal. I have been very happy with my progress in implementing the system into my daily life. I am currently using pen and paper.

My question is this… once I capture and clarify, I find myself keeping my sheets because I am afraid I am going to miss something from there. I also find myself thinking that it’s my way of keeping track of my daily progress.

Has anyone else kept their capture/clarify notes? I don’t necessarily want to keep them because I waste time going back and re-reading them daily.

I appreciate your input and thoughts. TIA
I usually have a notebook around for writing random thoughts into. I use software for my GTD lists, but even if I used paper, that paper would be separate from the random thoughts notebook.

Over the life of a notebook, I fill a lot of pages, and then I not infrequently tear out pages because they're no longer relevant and I'm comfortable getting rid of those particular pages, or because I transferred their thoughts into my formal GTD lists or because I re-wrote their thoughts on a fresh page.

By the time I've reached the end of a notebook, it usually still contains perhaps a quarter of its original pages. Then I go through it and (1) transfer stuff worth keeping to GTD or other more formal lists, (2) tear out more pages to trash/recycle or shred, and (3) put a few pages to keep in my "to file" stack. Then I throw out the notebook skeleton and start a new notebook.

A few weeks later, I'll come on the pages to keep in the "to file" stack, realize I don't care about them either, and either trash or shred them.

I am not presenting this as a carefully planned or efficient process. :) But it works for me.
 
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