So, today, I am sitting hear with the prospect of about two weeks off and figured now is a good time to start cleaning up my system so it’s ready to go for the New Year, January 1. To do that I am going to start with GTD collection. Over the last many many months, I’ve neglected my system and while it’s in place, I don’t feel like I can trust the system. The year end is a good time to collect everything into my GTD setup and get it whipped into shape.
If you have read my stuff before you know that I am a big believer in using checklists and starting with the front end of your system. I always start at the beginning and work my way down my collection points til I have everything collected. I thought I would give you a live rundown as I go through the process. Today is December 18 and as usual, I start my collection with all of my off site stuff that I need to collect into it and that is my mail. I stopped and picked that up today. Right now, it’s in my biggest inbox — my car…lol. Anyway, after that I start by getting my voice mail boxes to zero. This will be a pretty easy step.
While I am at it, I am going to take another look at my GTD checklist and the collection buckets I have listed to make sure it is complete.
It’s about 11:36 pm on a Friday night. I’ve got the TV on watching a movie… to complete the emptying of my voice mail, I will need a pen, some index cards and my phones.
Be back shortly.
OK. I’m back 12:37 am and I’ve completed my first set of collection buckets. This included all my voice mail, text, picture mail, sms’s, etc. I’ve also written a list of steps I took and saved them in a word file.
One thing I always do before I get started is grab my index cards and a pen. When I am cleaning out my voicemail, I always write everything down and delete everything as I go. When I am finished it says there are no more messages. It’s completely empty.
That is blackbelt voicemail. I do the same with text messages.
Once I am done, I google any unknown numbers. Record any calls I need to make on my @ calls list and any tasks I need to complete on my @office list.
It’s late but I think the next thing I am going to tackle is my email. I want to get everything out of my inbox. I took a break had something to snack on….I think that when I clean out my inbox, I will watch some Entourage.
Be back again.
Good morning. I actually went to bed last night but I did get a couple episodes of Entourage in.
Anyway, today’s goal is to do everything I did yesterday PLUS get my email inbox cleaned out. I’ve got about a 1000 plus emails in my account right now. Not to mention the fact that I have about 500 in my action folder that need to be completed. Today’s objective is just to get the inbox empty and later I will work on getting the action folder empty when I move onto the GTD processing stage. I am still in GTD collection right now and while you could argue that email is already collected. I don’t count it that way until I have everything collected in my action folder.
OK.It’s 12 noon right now and I’m ready to begin.
Well, I am back now and it’s about 10 pm. Off and on throughout the day, I’ve been emptying my email inbox out. I’ve now got it to zero. The way I process my email is I review everything that’s come in, act on it, file it or move it to an action folder. I’ve now got a big list of emails (572 to be exact) sitting in my action folder ready to be processed. What’s good is that I got everything out of in and identified everything that needs action. One tip I can give if you have a lot of email is to sort them by sender so you can mass file delete or move to an action folder.
As part of that, I also cleaned out my blackberry where I do send some of my emails. I mainly process from my desktop but on occasion send out email from my phone. Once I’ve taken care of my inbox in my email, I then have some loose ends in my blackberry that I like to delete. When I finished up, I went to the start of my checklist and re-did everything from the top again which didn’t take long.
So, I’ve made some headway. I am not going to dig into my action folder just yet, because I am still in my GTD collection phase. The next step for me is to clean out my biggest inbox which is my car and collect all of my lose papers. Once all of those papers are collected, I usually sort out all the supplies, trash and shredding to get the pile down to an “action” file just like my email. Then I’ll have two action areas to focus on.
Oh, by the way, I did record the steps I took to get through that on my GTD collection checklist so it’s gotten a little longer.
Let’s see if I have enough energy to get to that tonight. I’m kind of watching the Saints game right now as well. I’ll check back soon.
