David A. Harding
Monday, 04 Dec 2006
About a year ago, I read Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, and I began implimenting Limoncelli's ideas; a few months later I began reading David Allen's Getting Things Done, and I began implimenting Allen's ideas too. Both books repeatedly repeat the same point: you shouldn't try to remember stuff—you should record it when it happens. Limoncelli sugests writing everything down in your dayplanner. Allen augments the dayplanner with a an inbox.
My inbox is the best thing to happen to my organisational skills since I learned the alphabet. I'm cheap, and so my inbox is a Payless shoebox (Men's, size 12 1/2); I throw all sorts of stuff in there: bills, books, CD-ROMs, batteries, full media cards, empty bottles of ink, and almost everything else—this morning I collected all the tools laying haphazardly around my room and tossed them in my inbox. Once I throw something in the inbox I can stop thinking about it.
Three times a week, I sit down at my desk for half-an-hour and pull every item out of the inbox one item at a time. For each item, I do whaterver I need to do to move the item to a permanant location: bills get paid, books are shelved, CD-ROMs are filed, microwaved, or thrown out, batteries go in the recharger (or the trash), media card content is copied to disk and then deleted, ink bottles are re-ordered and thrown out, et cetra...
The only problem I have with my inbox is I can't put perishables in it. For example, I can't put a rotting apples or expired eggs in the inbox as a reminder to add apples or eggs to my shopping list. Trying to rememdy this situation, I've stuck a compostion book and pen on top of the refridgerator. I can scribble the name of anything I need to buy on into the book and read the entries in the book before my next shopping trip. (An alternate solution is to use a dry-erase board, but I hate writting on vertical surfaces.)