Home » Content » Blogs » borwick's blog

GTD and multiple inboxes

Submitted by borwick on Mon, 2006-03-20 18:05.

I have become a strong follower of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology for time management. I've been using the system for almost six months.

I'm now experiencing the discord of having too many inboxes:

  • my primary task list (kept in Outlook, believe it or not)
  • work inbox
  • Help Desk tickets
  • Change Request tickets
  • Microsoft Project project plans
  • Excel documents

I really feel like I should write a bunch of converters to merge all this stuff with my primary task list. I'm driving myself crazy because each system has its own set of priorities, so an email to me sometimes gets better response than a Help Desk ticket to me! Argh!

Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious delicious | digg digg | technorati technorati

Trackback URL for this post:

http://lopsa.org/trackback/710
borwick's blog | add new comment | 1856 reads

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
My solutions thus far
Submitted by borwick on Thu, 2006-08-10 06:17.

My current solution to the problem of "too many inboxes" is to review each inbox every week as part of my weekly review. I also break the GTD rules by scheduling some time to do the change requests and projects.

(GTD says that you shouldn't schedule anything outside the "hard landscape" of what you absolutely have to do, but I couldn't figure out another way to make sure that I processed my change requests and projects.)

reply
Tasks...
Submitted by jessetrucks on Fri, 2006-07-28 05:02.

Did you ever solve this dilemma?

--
Jesse Trucks, GCIH, GCUX
jesse@cyberius.net

reply