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After reading a tweet saying that I spend two hours/day emptying my inboxes fairy consistently, I was asked as an aside to list all of the inboxes (i.e., places where
attention tokens[1] collect) that I manage in my productivity practice. This was good timing, and I felt a review and analysis were in order. It's been a long time since I wrote
My GTD Collection Points - Guided Tour, With Pictures, so I figured, voila!, my next blog post.
Surprises: After doing this inbox review I learned that there are more of them than I thought (13!) While all my collecting points are intentional, there's certainly room to consolidate.
I'm curious
- What inboxes do you manage?
- Did you find more than you thought you had?
- Any special workflows around any of them?
- Anything you'd like to change in your setup?
I'd love to hear your comments.
Inboxes
These are the places where things requiring my attention arrive. There should be a minimum number of these, with the "big three" being email, voicemail, and paper. Following is an exhaustive list of mine.
- Paper Inbox - Desk: This is where I toss all incoming physical artifacts, including mail from my front office mail slot (see here for detail), my portable inbox (see below), paper notebook pages (see below), things I picked up around the house, notes from others, notes to myself while working (so I can stay on task), and my current project notes if I need to take an interruption (it works like a kind of action bookmark). Emptied daily.
- Paper Inbox - Portable: When away from my office I carry a folder in my briefcase that I use for collecting any paper I encounter. Things like receipts, meeting notes, and business cards go here. NB: Nothing in it is more than a day old, and everything gets emptied into the inbox on my desk (see above).
- Wallet: Continuing the on-the-go category, common "stealth" inboxes clients have include wallets, purses, pockets, and briefcases. Regarding wallets, I use mine for receipt collection. I do this consciously, and empty them daily into my desktop inbox. (Actually, that's not true. I empty them into a special "waiting for bank statement" queue, which is part of my routine financial workflow. See Custom Workflows For Knowledge Workers for examples.)
- Voicemail Inboxes: One each for home and work. I "empty" them multiple times per day (usually when taking a break) by writing down each message (who, what, when), noting action required, and putting it into my desktop inbox unless urgent. Note that I'm not doing any of the associated work, I'm just emptying it, two minute rule excepted. I do the same when I'm on the road, capturing cell vmail information in my paper notebook (or returning urgent and two minute calls) for later emptying.
- Email Inbox: This is the most challenging inbox to manage. I empty it multiple times per day, though it's an on-going struggle to not "check," i.e., to really process all new messages every time I start the program. ("Monitoring" is conceptually different, where you look for anything urgent. Whether this is required depends on the expectations in your work culture, as well as expectations you've conditioned in others.)
- Mail.app Notes: This is an odd one. I'm experimenting with using my phone's Notes app to capture late-night thoughts and actions (rather than notepad and lighted pen). The notes sync with iTunes, which means I have to treat them as an inbox. I've tried multiple To Do iPhone apps, but none appealed or were stable enough. I need to rethink this; I don't need more inboxes!
- Email "sent-from-iphone" Folder: Another odd one, this is a side-effect of the way my iPhone-to-Gmail sending works, and is not ideal. I use Google Reader to process feeds while between appointments, and email to myself articles worth reading. However, Gmail apparently notices some circularity and doesn't list these in my inbox. So I've created a filter to find them, but it means I have yet another collecting point to check. Needs rethinking.
- Mail Slot - Front Office: As mentioned above, the initial staging area for incoming paper mail is a set of shelves in the front of the office (the front of the house, in my case). This is typical in most workplaces, and simply means that I have to transfer it daily to my desktop inbox. Depending on your position you might have someone do this for you, or even better, do initial processing and filtering before it lands on your desk. Ain't delegation grand?
- RSS Feeds: I use my feed reader to collect a number of feeds, all of which I'm committed to emptying, with varying priority. Examples include:
- Local events,
- Google alerts (mentions of my name or blog, and of people and companies I want to help, i.e, want to form relationships with),
- News (mostly related to science, technology, and clients),
- Blogs (far fewer than in the past - I'm in a convergent mode [2] and have pruned a lot), and
- Twitter-related feeds (specific people I find to be of high value, including client relationships as mentioned above). I use RSS to track these because I've not found a desktop Twitter app I like. (As an aside: How can you determine value? That's an area our technology lags behind, and I think is a huge opportunity. For more see Information Provenance - The Missing Link Between Attention, RSS Feeds, And Value-based Filtering.)
- Twitter - Followees: I use Twitter.com to catch up with people I follow. Generally I scan these periodically, a few times a day, say, but I don't read every one. I save most of my Twitter attention for targeted following, mentions, and posting.
- Twitter - Mentions: I also prefer to use Twitter.com to track mentions of my account. These I treat at the same level of priority as my email inbox - direct correspondence with a 24 hour response time. (Related: What's Your Maximum Response Time? and Depressurize Your Email With A 24 Hour Response Time.)
- Capture - Portable Notebook: Carried with me at all times, I use spiral-bound notebook that's small, inexpensive, has perforated pages, and holds a pen. You can buy fancy leather-covered ones with cool retractable pens, but I prefer to keep it inexpensive. (Bonus: My daughter gave it to me, so I feel a connection each time I use it.)
- Capture - MTB Notebook: My final (whew!) inbox is a separate spiral notebook and pen that I keep in my CamelBak while mountain biking [3] to capture ideas that inevitably occur while grunting and sweating. (No, I don't carry a notebook during that activity!) I don't use the ubiquitous one above because I don't want to risk leaving it in one place or the other. After riding I tear out the sheets and toss them into my desktop inbox.
References