When do I remove an Item from the Inbox?

viking

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When do I remove an Item from the Inbox?
For example, let's say that I have an item that needs several steps and I therefore assign it to a "Project". I need to plan the project at a later time. It is now on my project list but is not complete. Do I remove from the Inbox at this stage?
Releated: I will have several Items, on different lists, that are not completed . How do I remember to complete the Items?
 

mcogilvie

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I’ve read three of your recent posts. It seems pretty clear to me that you’ve read a bit about GTD but have missed some important ideas. You need to master the GTD workflow diagram. Let me walk you through a bit of it, assuming we’re using lists on paper. You have something in your inbox, which will take several steps to complete. It’s a project, so you write the desired outcome for the project on your project list. If there is a hard deadline, write that down too. You ask yourself what’s the very next action you need to do. Write that down on the appropriate context list. More than one next action? Independent of the first one? Write it down too. What about the original inbox item? Get it out of your inbox. Does it have useful information or are you required to keep it? Stick it in a project support file. Otherwise toss it. Do you have a plan for your project? 90% of the time you don’t need it, and it gets in the way when change happens. Throw it in the project support file if you like. You now review your list, asking yourself what you can do now, based on context, time available, energy and priority (in that order). If you’re not sure what to do, pick something and do it. If you stop and there is more to do, it’s best to determine the next action and write it down. If you don’t, you should catch it when you do your next weekly review. In your weekly review, you review calendar, projects and next actions and make sure everything is moving as it should. Then back to work.

I know it may sound like a lot, and I know it may sound pretty simple. I can attest, and there are many like me, that GTD really does work. There are many ways to learn the material, but it does take time and effort. I had the advantage of prior exposure to other systems, so I knew a lot of approaches that didn’t work. GTD made sense from day one, but it still took me a while to become proficient, and I am still improving.
 

viking

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@mcogilvie,
Thank you for your response. I understand the steps as you described above. What I was trying to understand is when I remove the item from the inbox. Per your explanation:
It’s a project, so you write the desired outcome for the project on your project list. If there is a hard deadline, write that down too. You ask yourself what’s the very next action you need to do. Write that down on the appropriate context list. More than one next action? Independent of the first one? Write it down too.
If I have a lot of items like that, I may only have time to copy them to my project list. I will do the other steps as you described above later. Now, do I remove the items from my Inbox when I have copied them to my Project list(s) or do I wait until I have completed the steps above (decide on deadline, what actions do I need to take, context etc...)
 

mcogilvie

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For most projects, there is no deadline and you should not pick one. An arbitrary deadline can cause extra stress and distracts from real deadlines. And if you miss a phony deadline, you may feel you’ve failed. All you really need to keep going is at least one next action per project. If you don’t have one, the next weekly review should catch it. If you don’t know what the next actions should be, you can make a process next action on a list to determine the next actions. If you leave processed stuff in your inbox, it will burrow in for the winter, occupying mental and physical space you shouldn’t give it.

No one part of GTD is hard, or takes a lot of time. Doing it all habitually takes time to develop.
 

Brenaud10

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For most projects, there is no deadline and you should not pick one. An arbitrary deadline can cause extra stress and distracts from real deadlines. And if you miss a phony deadline, you may feel you’ve failed. All you really need to keep going is at least one next action per project. If you don’t have one, the next weekly review should catch it. If you don’t know what the next actions should be, you can make a process next action on a list to determine the next actions. If you leave processed stuff in your inbox, it will burrow in for the winter, occupying mental and physical space you shouldn’t give it.

No one part of GTD is hard, or takes a lot of time. Doing it all habitually takes time to develop.
I don’t mean to hijack OP’s thread, but I am having a hard time understanding where the list of tasks for a particular project should be stored if they are not actionable right now. Or do you just create next actions on the fly or a during weekly review. Appreciate your insight.
 

mcogilvie

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I don’t mean to hijack OP’s thread, but I am having a hard time understanding where the list of tasks for a particular project should be stored if they are not actionable right now. Or do you just create next actions on the fly or a during weekly review. Appreciate your insight.
Somehow we all have this feeling that every project needs a plan, but the truth is that for most people 90% of the plans (in the gtd sense of a desired outcome requiring more than one action) require not much more than a project and a next action. For most of the other 10%, you may need a little more, maybe an index card worth (I use a digital list tool, so it’s the note field of the project entry). For maybe 1-5% of the time you need more. That’s project support. It could be a word doc, a paper file folder, whatever format works for you and the project.

What’s not required for any project I have encountered is a list of “future next actions.” If they are obvious to you now, why shouldn’t they be obvious to you later? Will you know less in the future about the project? What happens when change happens and all those precise plans are not useful? I swear every military disaster has somebody saying “We must follow the plan.”

Examples:

1) My wife and I are considering renovating our patio into something more modern, using plants and grasses native to the area (my wife is a biologist). This is a big project in terms of time and expense, but it actually doesn’t require much “planning.” We’ve talked about it and visited our local botanical garden. Today she sent me some links to resources for review, so that is on my @web list, and on her waiting-for list. That’s it.

2) We are having a cautious dinner with another couple tomorrow night. Project support is in the notes field of the project- it’s the menu and shopping list.

3) I’m writing a textbook for a graduate-level course in my field. I had an outline of about two pages when I started writing. The writing is done, but the manuscript needs work on things like figures, problems and references. For that I have a checklist for project support. I happen to keep it in my list manager, but it’s not a list of next actions. A next action is something like “look up Coleman reference for Ch 7.”

Sorry for the lengthy reply, but I hope it helps.
 

Gardener

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Now, do I remove the items from my Inbox when I have copied them to my Project list(s) or do I wait until I have completed the steps above (decide on deadline, what actions do I need to take, context etc...)
I remove an item from my Inbox as soon as it's anywhere else--as soon as I've created a Project, put it in a Someday/Maybe list, etc. The instant it's anywhere else, it's out of the Inbox.
 

TesTeq

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If I have a lot of items like that, I may only have time to copy them to my project list.
@viking There's no "copy" in my GTD system. I never copy an item from my inbox to any of my lists (Someday/Maybe, Projects, or Next Actions). It's always "clarify & organize".
NO: unclarified stuff in my Inbox -> "copy" -> unclarified stuff on my Project list.
YES: unclarified stuff in my Inbox -> "clarify & organize" -> clarified outcome on my Project list, Next Action(s) on my @context list(s).
So, to answer your question, I remove an item from my inbox when it is clarified.
My GTD lists mustn't be contaminated with unclarified stuff.
 
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Brenaud10

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What’s not required for any project I have encountered is a list of “future next actions.” If they are obvious to you now, why shouldn’t they be obvious to you later? Will you know less in the future about the project? What happens when change happens and all those precise plans are not useful? I swear every military disaster has somebody saying “We must follow the plan.”
I understand what you are saying, but doesn't that go against GTD philosophy? What I mean by that is I thought a main point of getting things done was to get tasks/actions off your mind. If I have to remember the next actions(), what's the point of using the system. Sorry if the answer is obvious, but I am just not comprehending the process even though I have read the book twice, and halfway through a third run.
 

Gardener

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I understand what you are saying, but doesn't that go against GTD philosophy? What I mean by that is I thought a main point of getting things done was to get tasks/actions off your mind. If I have to remember the next actions(), what's the point of using the system. Sorry if the answer is obvious, but I am just not comprehending the process even though I have read the book twice, and halfway through a third run.
"Remember the next action(s)" suggests that at some point in the past you sat down to figure out some non-obvious next actions, and then you didn't make a note of them. But very often, the next action is obvious.

For example, let's say I'm putting in a new raspberry bed. The actions for any bed are to get the previous crop and any weeds out of the bed, fork, fertilize and amend, plant, and adjust the watering. I don't write all that down, because it's obvious to me. Instead, I'll just note the next action in the project for the bed.

So, if I'm in the middle of forking the bed and it rains before I'm done so that I have to stop, then the next time I review that project, the next action will be "Finish forking." I give that a context of "Garden Work." The purpose of the next action is as a bookmark reminding me of where I am, and also a way to gather all the Garden Work tasks together for the next time In working in the garden. I don't need to add all the obvious-to-me actions after that--that's just unnecessary added data entry, and work I may need to change later if the unexpected comes up.

For example, imagine that when I created the project, I put in a bunch of obvious actions, and I've progressed to the forking one:

Project: New raspberry bed
Finish forking
Fertilize and amend
Transplant raspberries from other beds
Insert drippers

But then let's say that I discover that there are a bunch of tree roots in the un-forked part of the bed. I have to edit:

Project: New raspberry bed
Bring clippers to garden
Cut tree roots
Finish forking
Fertilize and amend
Transplant raspberries from other beds
Insert drippers

Then it starts to rain, so that the bed will be a mud pit if I try to fork it. There's no prospect, any time soon, of the rain stopping for long enough for the bed to start to dry out, so I'll need to tarp it:

Project: New raspberry bed
Find a tarp.
Tarp the bed
WAITING FOR three days
Bring clippers to garden
Cut tree roots
Finish forking
Fertilize and amend
Transplant raspberries from other beds
Insert drippers

Or, alternatively, I could decide to just wait for the rain to stop:

Project: New raspberry bed
WAITING FOR bed to dry out
Bring clippers to garden
Cut tree roots
Finish forking
Fertilize and amend
Transplant raspberries from other beds
Insert drippers

But in any case, my system is carrying around a bunch of actions that it doesn't need to carry around, because they're utterly obvious to me. And every time something unexpected happens, I have to adjust those actions.

When we multiply this problem by a dozen or two or three projects, then I've added, not reduced, the load on my mind, because when I try to look at my lists I have to mentally shove away all the stuff that isn't yet relevant.
 

mcogilvie

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I understand what you are saying, but doesn't that go against GTD philosophy? What I mean by that is I thought a main point of getting things done was to get tasks/actions off your mind. If I have to remember the next actions(), what's the point of using the system. Sorry if the answer is obvious, but I am just not comprehending the process even though I have read the book twice, and halfway through a third run.
Gardener gave an excellent, detailed example, but perhaps I can explain it a bit more abstractly. It is certainly possible to plan too little, but it is also possible to plan too much. There is a zone in between, and it changes with competence and confidence. We want to get the project off our mind by knowing what the next step is, knowing where the finish line is, and doing the right amount of planning to get there. This is an example of what David Allen calls relaxed control: steering the car around potholes while retaining focus on the road ahead.
 

Oogiem

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What’s not required for any project I have encountered is a list of “future next actions.” If they are obvious to you now, why shouldn’t they be obvious to you later?
I track all sorts of future next actions in my projects. If I've thought about it once why should I go to the work to redo all that thinking again later? Why not capture it then? Doesn’t mean that if things change I can't change the actions but for well over 85% of my projects I can plan out the actions and they only change that usually happens is most likely due to weather issues.

Another thing which I've said many time here is that my entire GTD system is also an instruction manual for all the things I do, especially recurring projects, in enough detail that if I was injured or incapacitated someone else could continue to do them. Since a lot of what I do involves caring for the animals on the farm it's not like someone can just say it doesn't matter, They need to know exactly where the mineral recipe is for each group of sheep and how to make the mineral and who the sheep are and what stage in the year we are at and so on. So I document all those things as actions in my projects.
 

Oogiem

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What I mean by that is I thought a main point of getting things done was to get tasks/actions off your mind. If I have to remember the next actions(), what's the point of using the system
It really depends on what you know how to do vs what you may forget or need notes on later. If you 'll forget the steps and order is important you might put more things in your future action lists. I use a tool that hides all the actions except the actual next one if I choose to so I can have hundreds of actions in my projects but still only see the immediate next action when I look at my lists.

For example, for me I can have a next action that happens weekly to Make Mineral for sheep with a note of the recipe is in garbage can w/the premix. And I don't need to track the actual amount of each ingredient in my task system because I have it already written down and in the place I store the primary ingredient and the scale. I also know what classes of sheep we have at any given time and can look at the recipe and know what I am reading. But whenver the hay changes and I get a new hay nutritional analysis done and I send it off to the sheep nutritionist and he makes up a new mineral recipe for each class of sheep. Adult rams need a different mineral balance than growing rams or pregnant ewes oe ewes with lambs. Ewes with single or twin lambs need different minerals than ones with 3 lambs. Weaned lambs up to yearlings who are still growing need a differnet mix than do adult dry ewes. I know from trying to teach someone how to make the sheep mineral that I had to explain what classes of sheep were and how to know which group gets which mineral mix. I know what stage my sheep are in so right now for example we are in the flushing and first 3 weeks of breeding stage. Soon we'll move to the early gestation stage and the mineral mix for the bred ewes will change.
 
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