Every productivity system begins with capture. Dig into any system built around productivity and they all start by talking about capture. Capture in Tiago Forte's CODE, collection in GTD, fleeting notes in Zettelkasten — every one of them is talking about capturing material, tasks, and ideas. If you want to raise your productivity as a knowledge worker, it's worth taking another look at your capture stage.
There are a few principles around capture that work across the board.
1. Remove the constraints
There's a rule you're supposed to follow during brainstorming: don't criticize the ideas that come up. Criticism gets in the way of ideas flowing freely. In other words, don't nitpick, deflate people, and box them in. Capture works the same way — you want to remove filters, constraints, and hurdles as much as possible. At this stage in particular, I think focusing on quantity is a good choice.
To strip as many constraints as possible out of capture, immediacy matters. You need a system that lets you capture something the moment it comes to mind, without dithering. In my case, I set up my iPhone so that pressing the Action button takes me straight to a note. If something occurs to me while I'm walking down the street, I can start writing within a second. This is where GTD's task collection and Zettelkasten's fleeting notes come in.
If typing on a phone is a hassle and talking is easier for you, try voice memos. If analog suits you better, carry a notebook and pen with you at all times. Honestly, which method you use doesn't matter much. Everyone has their own preference. What matters is "remove the constraints and capture as much as you can." That's why immediacy matters. The moment something occurs to you, capture it.
2. Empty it regularly
Capture is easier than you'd think, because it takes no effort. Everyone finds it easy to set up a system that lets them jot something down within a second. We all built the habit of diligent note-taking back in school.
Emptying what you've captured, though, is hard. Just like how you could take notes diligently but never quite build the habit of going back over them. It takes effort, because you have to think as you process. When it comes to building the habit of emptying your inbox, I have no advice beyond insisting on its importance. All I can say is: put in the time and do it. Practice is what counts. Every day before bed, I make sure to spend about 30 minutes clearing out the notes and tasks I've captured. I don't love having it pinned to my calendar day after day either, but if you don't deliberately carve out that time, the inbox just piles up — there's no way around it. It takes initiative.
Before bed, I clear out what I've captured or review something.
Everything after capture unfolds from the process of emptying what you've captured. I'll cover that in a future newsletter.
3. Minimize the number of inboxes
Because of that regular emptying I just described, it's better to keep the number of inboxes to a minimum. Emptying inboxes scattered in every direction is a distracting business. Unfortunately, though, it's hard to minimize the number of inboxes through willpower alone. Email, Jira, Slack, Discord, a conversation with someone, things to read later, my own thoughts and tasks... information I need to attend to arrives through a lot of different routes. I even considered using an automation tool like Zapier to funnel everything into one place, but it struck me as pointless. It's better to handle this part as best you can, case by case. Just get used to it.
Still, keep the number of inboxes as low as you can manage. In my case, I capture every task and idea that isn't yet organized into Apple Notes. When someone at work suddenly stops by my desk and information comes up in a casual conversation, that goes into Apple Notes too. At the very least, the information I write down myself all gets collected in one place.