Organization System Step 3 - Collection
I am spending this blog week on my first-ever series of articles on the same topic. I implemented a new personal productivity and organization system using Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
A goal of this organization system is to give you a clear head at all times. A clear head can only come about if everything is dealt with in some fashion. By everything, I mean, literally, everything that is somehow taking up space in your brain as an open issue. David Allen’s organization system deals with every open issue and commitment you have with your job, family, friends, and most importantly, yourself.
In order to deal with everything, you have to capture everything to deal with. Start with any piles on your desk or current inbox system. Make one big pile somewhere, I used my guest bed. Open up all your desk drawers and grab the random junk that lies in there, throw it on the pile. I had blank cd-roms and DVDs, extension cords, greeting cards from my lady, hacky sacs, old markers and pens, tons and tons of rift-raft.
You are just getting started. Go into each room of the house. If there is anything that is out of place and it is small in size, grab it and put it in your pile. Closets are especially dicey. I had scary amounts of useless trivial crud piled up in the deep recesses of my walk-in closet. I also had 3 “junk drawers” throughout my place. I brought those into the guest bedroom and dumped them on the bed.
At this point a couple of feelings surfaced. I was excited that I was finally going to deal with all this stuff I had accumulated. I was also nervous, how the hell was I going to get through this junk pile of accumulated items spanning many years back? The next phase of collection is the most beneficial however.
Get a big pad of paper and a pen. Start with one room, look around it. Anything that you want to change about the room someday, such as “find a print for over the guest bedroom” or “re-organize book rack” – each gets written on a separate piece of paper and thrown into the pile. One item per page of page! Put each piece of paper on your junk pile. Don’t roll your eyes or blow this part off. You are not going to actually perform every action you have written down. But it will find its place in the organization system so that it is off your mind until it is time, or you have the desire, to deal with it.
When you have finished your room by room list of future actions you’d like to take, you need to list everything that is inside of your head. Any future projects, calls to make, trips you need to plan, emails you need to write, ALL OF IT, write each one down on a separate piece of paper and throw it in the pile. David Allen has a great list to help trigger things to write down, but you’ll have to get his book for that. My list included “research Desgrosseilliers Indian side of family” – something I’d like to do someday, maybe, but not sure if I ever will. “Write book” which I am in the process of doing, “Re-assess 401k allocations”, I hope this gets the idea across, write down anything you can think of – because you want your head clear.
The collection phase of the organization system can take a wide range of time depending on how much of a pack rat, mental or physical, you have tended to be. Looking at the massive mound of to-dos on my guest bed, I felt great. The size of my organization problem was now quantified. I simply had to mow through the pile and I would be completely, fully organized. If I had the tools to mow through the pile effectively, I might not have ever gathered such a pile of things to begin with. Tomorrow the heart of the organization system is revealed, how to deal with every single piece in your to-do pile and all future tasks that need to get done.
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