What is GTD*?

GTD is short for "Getting Things Done*". It's a system for personal productivity created by David Allen. Here's a more formal definition.

Here, you can learn about GTD, and how to do it using Note Studio.

Important:
Now, there are many different ways to do GTD, and Note Studio is only one of them. Unless his official website says otherwise, David Allen does not endorse Note Studio, and we have no connection with his company.

In fact, we designed Note Studio long before we heard about GTD. It's only after our users kept telling us how they loved Note Studio for GTD, that we thought we'd better investigate what GTD actually was. Now, we're converted!

If you're interested in GTD, why don't you check out David Allen's website. We highly recommend both the GTD book and the audio book.

* GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of Davidco

Note Studio GTD Refresher

5. The Inbox

All day, every day, things are bouncing into your life which create work for you to do.

For example, every time a piece of mail arrives in your mailbox, it may be:

something you can throw away and ignore (eg junk mail)
something you want to keep to read later (eg a newsletter)
something you need to act on, either now or in the future (an invitation, a bill to pay, a form to return, an offer to consider etc)

In GTD these items are called 'inputs'.

Now, I've just mentioned your mailbox, but these inputs are actually coming at you from a lot of directions! You've got phones, voicemail, email, faxes, meetings, your boss talking to you, and so on. Every time an input comes in, it could contain work for you to do.

Is it any wonder we feel busy?

In GTD, incoming items (inputs) come into an Inbox. Now, when I say 'inbox', you're probably picturing one of those in-trays which sits on your desk, storing incoming pieces of paper.

But I want to give you a broader definition of an inbox:

An Inbox is where you store inputs before you get them into your system.

At this stage, you might be thinking, "I don't have an inbox!"

But using the above definition, that is unlikely to be the case. In fact, if you don't have a well-defined inbox, most likely you have more inboxes than anyone! Where do you store incoming items that haven't made it into your system yet?

beside the front door
kitchen table
on top of the TV
your nearly-full answering machine
your overflowing email inbox
the back seat of your car
next to your bed...

Without well-defined inboxes, you probably have items waiting your attention everywhere. That's exhausting, because you see them everywhere you look.

Generally, it simplifies everything if you have as few inboxes as possible. It makes going through them much easier, and more reliable.

Personally, I have managed to get my system down to four inboxes:

the "inbox" in my email program, where new emails arrive,
a physical in-tray at my work,
a second physical paper tray at my home
an 'inbox' page on my computer/Palm PDA.

Any input from any source, will end up in one of those four inboxes:

email comes into my email inbox
home, work, and cell-phone messages are written on a scap of paper and deposited in either my home or work intray, or transferred to my 'inbox' page on my computer/PDA.
faxes are transferred to my home intray
physical mail is transferred to my home intray
conversation records, verbally-assigned tasks, or meeting notes end up on scraps of paper in my physical in-trays.

This means I often use a piece of paper to represent a physical object. Say my garden hose gets a hole in it. Whereas I formerly would have left my hose somewhere obvious, so I kept tripping over it until I fixed it, now it will go on a scrap of paper in my intray - "fix garden hose" - and I can actually pack the hose away out of sight. That's the idea of an inbox - it stores inputs, until we can give them some attention.

You might want to think about the inboxes you have in your life, and consider whether you can simplify them at all.

Next, we're going to look at the trouble with most people's inbox.

Note Studio and Your Inbox

Note Studio can be used as an inbox, by using it as a capture tool. We'll talk about capture tools later, but the key is, they're for jotting down thoughts and ideas when and where they occur to you. You store them in your capture tool, until you are ready to transfer them into your full GTD repository. In this way, you're using part of your Note Studio as an inbox.

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