Productivity in Context » Blog Archive » Capture Tools for Individual Needs

Capture Tools for Individual Needs - A Story

February 10th, 2009 by Stephen

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Dave has a great post, a story, really, that leads to a description of his Ubiquitous capture tool

Open the cabinet to the right of the refrigerator, just above the pink laminate counter top, and you would have found my mother’s recipes. Unlike your mom’s collection, Carol’s never saw the inside of a cookbook. Instead, they hung from the back of the door with yellowing strips of tape.

A Hellman’s mayonnaise label with a potato salad recipe hung next to my grandmother’s hand-written instructions for stuffed squid. There were pages ripped from Family Circle magazine, supermarket hand-outs, 3×5 index cards, torn business envelopes with their postmarked stamps intact … anything flat enough to write on and light enough to stick to a pine cupboard door was used to capture a recipe.

[…]

While the fly strip method of recipe storage keeps everything accessible, it isn’t much of a filing system. Linguini with anchovy paste rubs up against blueberry cheesecake, which is something that should never happen, not even in print.

Like most messes, my mother’s organizational style had the tendency to spread, like an invading army, or syphilis. The inside of my dad’s garage looked like a yard sale threw up, and the state of the basement was something I won’t even mention.

What all this means is that I’ve got chaos in my blood. It didn’t become problematic until I started working for myself. Those painful moments of realization — “Oh, I really need to …” — were becoming more common, and always at the least opportune times. Remembering to tell the cable company that I’ve been issued a new debit card is of no use at 60 m.p.h. on Route 6.

Thankfully, I found David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it truly changed my life. When you’ve got a trusted system in place, your brain stops pestering you. When you’ve got your pending tasks sorted by context, you relax. What’s more, you get stuff done (I think that’s where he got the name).

One of the crucial aspects of a GTD system is the ubiquitous capture tool. Basically, Dave wants you to write down, or “capture,” any thought, task, or “open loop” as he calls them for later procesing. Which is a fancy way to say “write shit down.” It’s simple, low tech and — brace yourselves — it works.