Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part I

Posted on October 25, 2005 by
Categories: Simplification

Originally Published October 2005

In GTD, an in-box is any place where stuff comes into your life to be processed. David Allen has you think about where your in-boxes are, and they typically include things like voice mail, e-mail, physical boxes, etc.

Recently I had the great privilege to participate in a mentoring project through my company, and my protege and I were paired up on the basis of her needing help getting things organized. She was having a lot of difficulty with shifting priorities, and keeping track of working full time, household stuff and attending school full time. I described the GTD system to her, and we agreed to give it a try.

During the exercise, I think I learned as much as she did, because as we walked through the process, I scrutinized what my system contained and thought about how I could streamline it.

Since the beginning of August ’05, I’ve been thinking about in-boxes. And here is what they were then at the beginning of August:

Voicemail:

  • home
  • client
  • work
  • cell phone

Email:

  • client
  • work
  • Yahoo
  • Hotmail
  • Personal email via D.S.L. provider
  • Personal email via old I.S.P.
  • Shared family email
  • Web master alternate email
  • Web master email
  • Free organization email #1
  • Free organization email #2
  • Free organization email #3

Electronic Input:

  • 6 separate blog reading sites
  • My hometown newspaper
  • My mother’s hometown newspaper
  • My local newspaper
  • 7 Yahoo news groups
  • Yahoo bookmarks for reading later
  • Yahoo bookmarks for entry into my master list

Physical In-boxes:

  • Client
  • Home on desk
  • Home by door

Other:

  • Palm Diddlebug
  • Palm Slap
  • Palm Voice memos
  • Portable thumb drive
  • Note book for weekends

Over the next few articles, I will show how I tackled each of these and got them down to a manageable size and into the system so that they are all processed regularly.

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