You will be able to move any incoming item through the first three GTD steps.
On a Thursday afternoon Priya has a meeting invite from the agency, a forwarded email from her manager that just says "FYI", a WhatsApp from her cousin about a family dinner, a scanned receipt she needs to claim, and an idea for a campaign she scribbled on a napkin at lunch. Each one is a different kind of thing, and each asks for a different response. Most people deal with this by reacting to whichever item is loudest.
David Allen's Getting Things Done gives you a fixed sequence instead. This lesson covers the first three steps, which turn a pile of mixed inputs into a set of lists you can work from.
Allen describes five steps for getting control of your work: capture, clarify, organise, reflect and engage. Capture collects everything. Clarify decides what each item means. Organise puts it in the right place. Reflect is the regular review that keeps the lists current. Engage is the actual doing, choosing what to work on in the moment.
Reflect is the subject of module 8, and engage is what the rest of this course helps with. Here we take the first three, because they are what you do every day with everything that comes in.
Capture means getting every input into a small number of collection points, which Allen calls inboxes. An inbox in this sense is any place where new things land and wait to be dealt with: your email, a notes app on your phone, a physical tray on your desk for paper.
Aim for a few inboxes rather than exactly one. Most people need two or three. A common setup is your email, one notes or task app on your phone for anything that occurs to you or anything someone asks in person or in chat, and a tray or folder for paper. Priya chose her work email and the inbox of her task app. The napkin idea goes into the app as a quick note. The cousin's message stays in WhatsApp but she adds "reply to Anjali about dinner" to the app, so the chat is no longer the only record.
Capture should be fast and unthinking. If adding something takes longer than a few seconds, you will skip it when you are busy, which is exactly when you most need to capture.
Clarify is where you make decisions, and it is the step most people skip. For each item in an inbox, ask: is this actionable? Does it need me to do something?
If the answer is no, there are three places it can go. Delete it if it has no further use. File it as reference if you might need the information later, such as the FYI email with a policy attached. Or park it on a someday or maybe list if it is something you might want to do but not now, such as a course you are curious about or a trip idea. Allen calls the last one incubating.
If the answer is yes, ask what the very next action is and whether it takes less than two minutes. Lesson 2.3 covers both of those properly. For now, notice that "yes, this needs action" is not the end of the decision. You also need to decide what kind of action and where it belongs.
Priya clarifies her Thursday pile. The FYI email is reference, so she files it. The receipt needs action: submit the claim. The agency invite needs a decision: accept or decline. The napkin idea is not for this quarter, so it goes on someday. The dinner needs a reply.
Actionable items go into one of four places.
Next actions list: single, visible steps you can take as soon as you have time, such as "submit claim for the S$48 taxi receipt in the expense system". Projects list: any outcome that needs more than one step, such as "year-end campaign launched", each with at least one next action on the next actions list. Waiting-for list: things you have handed to someone else or are waiting on, with the person and the date, such as "agency: revised visuals, asked Monday". Calendar: actions that must happen at a specific time or on a specific day, such as the agency meeting once accepted.
The waiting-for list is the one most people have never kept, and it often helps fastest. Without it, delegated work sits in your head as a vague worry, or you forget to chase it until the deadline passes.
The calendar rule matters too. Allen is strict that the calendar should hold only what really has to happen on that day or at that time. If you fill it with things you would like to do on Tuesday, you start ignoring it, and then you miss the things that really were fixed. Lesson 3.3 adds time blocks to the calendar on purpose, which is a different use, but the principle holds: anything on the calendar is a commitment you mean to keep.
The S$48 receipt in Priya's list is an example figure. The point is the shape of the entry, a clear action with enough detail that she does not need to look anything up before doing it.
You do not need to clarify every input the moment it arrives. In fact you shouldn't, because that turns every new email into an interruption. Capture constantly, then clarify and organise in batches, once or twice a day, the same way you will handle email in module 5.
Your activity is to practise the clarify step on real items. Take ten from your current inboxes, and for each one, decide whether it needs action and where it ends up.
Take ten items from your current inboxes and run each through clarify, writing where it ends up.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).