Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part I

October 25th, 2005 | Simplification

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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.