Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity pdfdrive com

Minimize the Number of Collection Buckets
You should have as many in-baskets as you need and as few as you can get by
with. You need this function to be available to you in every context, since things

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you’ll want to capture may show up almost anywhere. If you have too many
collection zones, however, you won’t be able to process them easily or
consistently.
An excess of collection buckets is seldom a problem on the high-tech end; the
real improvement opportunity for most people is on the low-tech side, primarily
in the areas of note-taking and physical in-basket collection. Written notes need
to be corralled and processed instead of left lying embedded in stacks,
notebooks, and drawers. Paper materials need to be funneled into physical in-
baskets instead of being scattered over myriad piles in all the available corners
of your world.
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the
least work are the most active.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Implementing standard tools for capturing ideas and input will become more
and more critical as your life and work become more sophisticated. As you
proceed in your career, for instance, you’ll probably notice that your best ideas
about work will not come to you 
at
work. The ability to leverage that thinking
with good collection devices that are always at hand is key to increased
productivity.
Empty the Buckets Regularly
The final success factor for 
collecting
should be obvious: if you don’t empty and
process the “stuff” you’ve collected, your buckets aren’t serving any function
other than the storage of amorphous material. Emptying the bucket does not
mean that you have to 
finish
what’s in your voice-mail, e-mail, or in-basket; it
just means you have to take it out of the container, decide what it is and what
should be done with it, and, if it’s still unfinished, organize it into your system.
You don’t put it back into “in”! Not emptying your in-basket is like having
garbage cans that nobody ever dumps—you just have to keep buying new ones
to hold all your trash.
In order for you to get “in” to empty, your total action-management system

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must be in place. Too much “stuff” is left piled in in-baskets because of a lack of
effective systems “downstream” from there. It often seems easier to leave things
in “in” when you know you have to do something about them but can’t do it
right then. The in-basket, especially for paper and e-mail, is the best that many
people can do in terms of organization—at least they know that 
somewhere
in
there is a reminder of something they still have to do. Unfortunately, that safety
net is lost when the piles get out of control or the inventory of e-mails gets too
extensive to be viewed on one screen.
When you master the next phase and know how to process your incompletes
easily and rapidly, “in” can return to its original function. Let’s move on to how
to get those in-baskets and e-mail systems 
empty
without necessarily having to
do
the work now.

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Process
Teaching them the item-by-item thinking required to get their collection buckets
empty is perhaps the most critical improvement I have made for virtually all the
people I’ve worked with. When the head of a major department in a global
corporation had finished processing all her open items with me, she sat back in
awe and told me that though she had been able to relax about what meetings to
go to thanks to her trust in her calendar, she had never felt that same relief about
all the many other aspects of her job, which we had just clarified together. The
actions and information she needed to be reminded of were now identified and
entrusted to a concrete system.
What do you need to ask yourself (and answer) about each e-mail, voice-mail,
memo, or self-generated idea that comes your way? This is the component of
action management that forms the basis for your personal organization. Many
people try to “get organized” but make the mistake of doing it with incomplete
batches of “stuff.” You can’t organize what’s incoming—you can only collect it
and process it. Instead, you organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the
decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done. The whole deal—both the
processing
and 
organizing
phases—is captured in the center “trunk” of the
decision-tree model shown here.

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