The first meeting will take place on Thursday, October 23rd at Swork Coffee in Eagle Rock at 7:00 PM.

Here’s the description of the first meetup, taken from the site:

This first Meetup will be a general introduction to each other and our respective blogs, and an opportunity to voice your preferences for which aspects of blogging should be emphasized for the next Meetup. Candidate topics include:

• Technical issues: hosting services, plugins, audio/video, WordPress configuration and RSS syndication
• Content issues: niche selection, topic selection, brainstorming, posting frequency and copywriting
• Promotion: traffic, analytics, social networks, SEO and comment marketing
• Monetization: direct advertising, product launches, affiliate programs and ad networks

Feel free to suggest other topics or concerns. This is your Meetup as much as mine.

Jonathan Mead of the personal development blog Illuminated Mind will also be in attendance as the assistant organizer. If you’re interested and local, please follow the link above to RSVP or contact me.

Assuming that every task needs to be tracked, is it necessary to track everything everywhere? Do we need to keep our domestic activities parked in the same system as our work activities? And what about the reverse? Some people work in high-security situations that make it impossible to bring materials out of the office. And many of those who don’t simply want to leave work behind.

One system to rule them all

A canonical GTD implementation would be one system for everything — home and office, personal and professional. But not all GTD users find this satisfying. I felt the same way once, and experimented with maintaining a dual system.

It didn’t work for me. Whenever I would look at my action lists at work, I would always be aware that they were incomplete. I shouldn’t have mattered, since I couldn’t do anything on my @Home list when I was at work, but not being able to see it during my daily review in the morning became progressively irritating.

I could capture something on my notetaker wallet or throw any personal paperwork in my To Home folder, but I’ve always found it more satisfying to process paperwork right on the spot. As I processed my work in-basket and came across personal items, I would transfer these to the To Home folder, then transfer them to my home in-basket — so I’d handle the same piece of paper three times. Some of this “home” paperwork related to actions I could only take in the daytime, so it was ultimately more efficient to file that paperwork in my work file cabinets.

More importantly, I noticed that I starting thinking about personal issues at work more than usual. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The whole point of GTD is to get things out of my head and into an external system. The more I realized that the system wasn’t accessible, my mind became the system, taking up the slack for those absent written reminders. So I went back to putting everything in the system — my @Home, @Errands and @Anywhere list — and the problem vanished.

Going back to a single, integrated system also made my weekly reviews much easier. I could do one review from one location instead of splitting my efforts, as I had been doing during that trial period. Even though I was processing the same number of tasks in the dual-system approach, it felt like twice the work due to setup time.

A personal preference

That was my experience, but others find it uncomfortable to have their personal items potentially visible to coworkers or supervisors. Still others simply find it more aesthetic to have completely separate systems for personal and professional projects.

If it’s simply an issue of personal security and/or privacy, I’d recommend keeping your entire personal/professional system ubiquitously available, but not necessarily in the same place. For instance, you might keep your work-related list and calendar entries in Outlook, but your personal ones on paper — or on your PDA without synchronizing those items to your work desktop.

If it’s a company security issue, where the office doesn’t allow you to bring things into work or take them out, then the decision is already made for you. You have to maintain dual systems. If a personal project or task occurs to you during work hours, write it down when you’re at your desk; then as soon as you have a break, review what you’ve written down write before leaving the office. Immediately after leaving the office, do a mind sweep and put that list in your car.

How do you integrate or separate your personal and professional systems?

(Photo credit: Andrew*)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

The word “productivity” has been overused and misused for years, especially in an age of “life hacks” that span from extended travel and income automation to novel applications of binder clips. More specifically, productivity has become synonymous with self-actualization, which troubles some writers with faux-humanist or New Age proclivities. But the frequent misuse of a word doesn’t necessarily cancel its usefulness. What called for is greater precision with language.

Work and production

The real root of people’s frustration with the word “productivity” lies in the English language’s absence of a word that addresses the full spectrum of work. There are fundamentally two types of work:

• Work that has personal or social value
• Work that has economic or exchange value

Notice that when people use terms like “work-related” or “work life,” they invariably mean work in the latter category. But work is simply the energy expended to realize an outcome — any outcome, whether it’s throwing a party, starting a company, doing a cross-country road trip, completing a client presentation, or reaching one’s ideal weight.

The two poles encapsulate a spectrum of fulfillment, rather than mutually exclusive modes of existence. We get an education (what the Greeks categorized as a leisure activity) to increase our job prospects. We often get personal satisfaction from projects completed at work. Many of us hold the ideal of monetizing our hobbies or passions in order to spend our days doing what we love.

Why killing your job won’t kill your dissatisfaction

From Twitter, last May:

Me: Article writing. Sigh. Wishing I could blog full time. Gawker or GigaOM, please buy me out!

Gina Trapani, four hours later: Some days I dream of quitting my job and becoming a full-time blogger. Oh, wait.

It’s tempting to imagine that other people or external situations are the source of our discontent. When people do manage to extricate themselves from their day jobs, they often wind up transferring their discontent to other agents: not enough clients, too many clients, bad clients, a bad economy and so on. But the enemy lies within.

Life is multidimensional. A job is only one aspect of our work, and one aspect of our lives. There’s no such thing as a “dream job” if it’s meant to be the lynchpin for a fulfilled existence. Work on your job, work on your health, work on your marriage, but stop trying to get everything out of any one of them. Even the best things in life are unhealthy in excess.

The lazy workaholic

The workaholic is the classic “one-dimensional man,” bereft of identity beyond a single area of focus. Workaholics avoid confronting many life issues by throwing themselves exclusively into one. Since they’re continually in motion, they can never be accused of being lazy by those who use activity as their metric for productivity.

True productivity involves realizing and recognizing all values that contribute to a meaningful existence. Meaning doesn’t bestow itself on a person; it has to be actively discerned and defined through a continuous, cyclical process of thinking and doing.

Areas of focus

Setting goals without meditating on values is a reliable way to concentrate one’s life too narrowly. One way to counteract the tendency to overidentify with one aspect of life is to create a list of all aspects that have meaning, which in this case we’ll call areas of focus. An example would be:

• Professional
• Health
• Marriage
• Family
• Friendships
• Learning
• Community
• Financial Independence

This is just one possible array of values among many. Some people might subsume “Marriage” into the larger category of “Family.” Others will see romance as a significant enough component to keep marriage separate from general family issues. Some people don’t value civic participation, so “Community” wouldn’t appear on their list. For some people, “Learning” will be too broad of a category for a specific field of interest, like painting; so “Art” might be a more accurate focus area. Some people don’t need “Financial independence,” but would be content with a balanced checkbook and zero debt, so “Finance” would be a more accurate label.

Areas of Focus should be an authentic, personal list that reflects what you’re willing to spend time and energy on. Don’t put down “Community” if you’re not active in the community, or don’t plan to be.

The litmus test, other than your intuition, is your project list. Look at each of your focus areas and ask yourself, “Do I have any projects about this?” If the answer is no, you have two options: work out what projects you need to fulfill the area of focus, or ask yourself if it really matters to you. The Areas of Focus list is a great tool for identifying blind spots in your project list. Review your focus areas whenever you feel like your actions are out of alignment with your values.

(Photo credit: jordan.meeter)

Nick: Like, what do you do all day?
Roger: What do I do all day? I sit here and think of ways to make people feel bad.
Nick: I thought you wrote commercials.
Roger: I do. But you can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that there’s something missing from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: Well, yeah, I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you can convince them that your product is the only thing that can fill that void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they run out and buy a stupid pair of cargo pants.

Life beyond stuff

Decluttering is fundamentally an emotional process. It reopens the void filled through relentless acquisition by reversing the habit. From the outside looking in, purging seems like an extension of interior decorating, but it’s really a project of reevaluating each thing in our lives and deciding whether it’s a want or a need, and whether that need is current or obsolete.

Things can be physical, like the boat someone takes out once a month to avoid feeling guilty about using it less after spending thousands of dollars on it. They can be schedule obligations, like weekly status meetings requiring PowerPoint masturbations. Or they might take the form of habits, like checking email for lack of anything better to do. These are all emotional investments, and once they seem to become permanent fixtures, the rest of life begins to ossify.

The two thresholds of stuff: real and representative

Stuff is often used to express a person’s identity: state of the art gadgets, overpopulated to do lists, bookshelves filled with impressive titles. But stuff can also become “points of entry.” Points of entry are things that represent some aspect of our identity: an interest, aspiration or value. Once the “what” that’s being represented is identified, it becomes easier to get rid of the representations.

A book collection might represent a passion for knowledge. If a passion for knowledge is important, that value doesn’t go away by getting rid of the symbolic version. Paring down the collection to the absolute minimum might even release a preoccupation on past knowledge, making it easier to acquire knowledge through newer books, or through alternative ways that haven’t been considered — like, heaven forbid, asking people questions.

An album of family photos containing every snapshot ever taken might represent the memory of being a family, but some photos are more memorable than others. An album largely filled with unmemorable pictures renders the collection as a whole unmemorable. By keeping the few pictures that represent highlights and discarding the rest, the album becomes more memorable and meaningful. “More” is measured in value rather than volume.

When less is more

Getting unstuffed and unstuck requires a paradigm shift. We trade tangible items that reinforce our stability for intangible experiences that facilitate transition. It requires consciously focusing on what we gain by removing impediments to change, not on what we theoretically lose.

• What would you be doing if you didn’t automatically turn on the television the moment you walked in the living room?
• How would your sense of time famine change if you eliminated most (or all) of your RSS feeds without replacing them?
• Is a household full of high-maintenance, time consuming items really abundance?

Decluttering certainly involves creating space and clearing obstructions, but at a deeper level it’s about letting go of attachments to objects, events and habits that anchor us to a less mature past. The goal isn’t wholesale renunciation of the material world. If a gadget solves a real problem efficiently, or a painting in the living room adds real beauty, they can enhance our lives without becoming identity traps. Amenities and luxuries aren’t necessarily clutter. We need fat, but not obesity.

Look at the life you want to create for yourself, the lifestyle you want to pursue or impact you would like to have on the world, and see if you can name an overall theme to it. Go through your stuff item by item and ask if it supports this theme. If the answer is yes, keep it; otherwise get rid of it. Filter out the things that no longer add value to life.

(Photo credit: Peter Figetakis)

After I reviewed Julie Morgenstern’s instant decluttering classic, When Organizing Isn’t Enough, the publisher was kind enough to arrange an interview for me with the guru of personal organizing.

Julie’s best known work, Organizing from the Inside Out, focused on finding better homes for the stuff in our lives, making it more accessible. When Organizing Isn’t Enough is designed to address an entirely different problem — excess — using a four-step process called SHED:

• Separate the treasures. Find the possessions, time commitments and behaviors that support the transition to a new life theme
• Heave the trash. Eliminate the non-treasures that anchor us in in the past
• Embrace your identity. Determine who you are without your stuff
• Drive yourself forward. Fill the void with new activities and interests that fulfill your new theme

As I mentioned in the review, the book defines and deals with clutter in a fairly unconventional way, discussing schedule clutter, habit clutter, and of course, physical clutter.

Interview timeline

• SHED defined
• Physical, schedule and habit clutter
• The difference between decluttering and organizing
• Beyond minimalism and aesthetic correctness
• The importance of naming your theme

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Unfortunately, the distortion on my end of the conversation when I played it back forced me to edit out all of my live questions, and substitute them for voice-overs; so my apologies for the NPR-ish inteview format. Now I know how not to record a podcast. Fortunately, the answers I got from Julie more than make up for my folly.

Imagination might be insufficient, but our minds are filled with too many thoughts to action all of them, or even most of them. Exerting continuous partial effort on a wide spectrum of ambitions is unsustainable. Since we’re all subject to finite resources, it’s more strategic to work on a few critical projects at a time (one at any particular point in time), while having reliable placeholders for everything else. Without these placeholders, thoughts related to uncommitted projects will continue to hover at the edge of our attention and scatter our focus.

With any endeavor, it’s important to recognize that it’s either an active project, or it’s not. If it’s not an active project, we need to determine what our relationship it is. If a thought, or cluster of thoughts, doesn’t have a specific focus, we need to collect it in order to determine what it amounts to. Let’s look at three strategies for dealing with thoughts that consume attention but aren’t yet actionable.

Someday/maybe actions and projects

We’re constantly exposed to things that might be attractive, but aren’t necessarily worth thinking about more than once. You might like someone’s shoes, and imagine what it would be like to wear them, but aren’t considering actually purchasing them. Skydiving is kind of interesting to me, but not enough to want to do it myself when I could be doing something I find even more interesting. We might see a billboard for a product that we wouldn’t turn down for free, but promptly forget about otherwise. These types of thing don’t need to be tracked.

But some things are more compelling, and consume repeat attention. Taking a trip to Paris, going to grad school, starting an internet business, or trying a new restaurant are thoughts that you know you’re not ready to take action on for some specific reason or intuitive reservation, yet you can’t stop thinking of them.

To prevent them from becoming distractions, they need to be tracked just like active projects, but without the further detail of their component action steps. They need to be mindfully deferred, not haphazardly ignored. They’re things you’ve consciously decided not to make a decision on at this time, either because the right circumstances aren’t in place yet (your children are still at home, you need one more paycheck, etc.), or it just doesn’t feel like a priority.

Instead of keeping a host of potential projects and opportunities under consideration at all times, or randomly reminding ourselves of them, it’s much easier to keep them written down on a someday/maybe list for scanning or revising once a week during a weekly review. Keeping these items in an outboard memory system keeps you from being preoccupied with them from moment to moment.

Research projects

These are sometimes called look-into projects, process projects, or simply the shorthand “R&D.” Research projects are designed to clarify whether or not an intention should become an active project, or to determine what it would take to make a potential project actionable.

The goal is not to simply consume information. A research project has a specific outcome in mind. You’re thinking about learning scuba diving, but have no idea of what kind of commitment is required in terms of time, money and effort. So your project would be something like, “R&D: Taking scuba diving lessons.” You might draft a checklist of factors to consider:

• Cost of scuba diving lessons
• Cost of renting equipment vs. buying
• Hours of instruction
• Local dive spots

You determine the next actions needed to fill in the blanks of your knowledge around this topic. Then you can make an informed decision about whether or not you have the resources necessary to make learning to scuba dive an active project.

As you can see, a research project is just another entry on your project list, with at least one concrete next action on an action list. You may find that you don’t have the time or money available to pursue the lessons right now, in which case you would put “Take scuba diving lessons” on your someday/maybe list; or you might find that you’re not interested enough in scuba diving to pay the price, now or later, in which case you check off the research project as done and move on. Whether you decide to pursue diving, defer it, or delete it, the research project that lead to your decision has a successful outcome.

Edgework

You want to go to college, but don’t have a major. You want to start a blog, but don’t have a topic. It’s not a case of lacking ideas, but lacking enough experience or information to congeal into a singular focus. Some people find themselves drawing animals, but have no idea of what they intend to do with these drawings. Some people like reading business magazines, but have no specific plans for starting a business of their own. These are thoughts or artifacts that hover at the edge of our attention with no focal point.

Edgework is the art of collecting this flotsam and letting it incubate. The point isn’t to impose an agenda on this material but to amass enough of it to eventually examine in one place and identify an overarching theme. You notice a pattern to the types of articles you read online, then create a bookmark folder or an online notebook (like Google Notebook or Evernote) with a label to the pattern. Someone might create a physical file for his animal drawings; someone else might create a file of clippings of entrepreneurial articles, along with any handwritten notes related to them; another person might scan photos of design ideas into a digital folder.

By repeatedly examining these collections, we create an thematic awareness that gradually funnels into a more conscious understanding of what motivated us to think about the source material in the first place. You can either collect this material at an organic pace, or accelerate the process with a reverse mind map: a cluster of free associations where the central theme is left blank until the end of the brainstorming process.

Keep potential projects externalized

Just because something isn’t worth thinking about doesn’t mean you won’t think about it. If you keep thinking about something without processing it into something actionable, it becomes mental garbage that needs to go somewhere. Create drawers, trash cans and compost heaps outside of your mind to keep your mind engaged on the things that really matter to you. A mind is a terrible thing to keep filled with waste.

(Photo credit: Bookshelf Boyfriend)

Appointments. The need to schedule appointments is self-evident. If the dentist says 8:00 to 9:30 am, don’t trust your memory or an untimed list entry to keep the appointment unless you’re willing to pay the bill whether you show up or not.

Day-specific events. The gas bill is due September 12. The client presentation has to be finished by Friday. The poetry workshop starts August 29. Day-specific actions must happen on a certain day, begin on a certain day, or be completed by a certain day.

Time-specific events. Mike is out of the office until 2:30. Rather than look at the entry several times on your @Calls list before you can take action, you slate the first opportunity to make the call on your calendar.

What makes them “hard landscape” is that the time frames are already fixed. You can move the shrubbery, but not the patio. You can’t decide to call Mike earlier than he’ll be available. You could pay the gas bill in October, but not without consequences. In terms of your calendar, hard landscape is externally committed time.

The danger of using a calendar as a to do list

In time management, the standard practice is to use the calendar as a to do list. After all, some things need to be done at or by a certain time, so why not just throw time-independent tasks in the same grid? And while we’re at it, why not arrange them in an arbitrary sequential order, with equally arbitrary time blocks?

Yes, those are loaded questions. Of course, people do try to make strategic decisions about when an option task should be done, and how long it should take. As long as they work in interruption-free environments, scheduled to do lists can be effective. As a freelance writer, I could actually get away with this approach, though I choose not to.

But for the average office worker, a scheduled to do list is a house of cards that can collapse with one interruption. The next time your boss comes up to you during the time you’ve blocked out to work on a project, try using your calendar entry as an excuse to refuse the interruption, and see how that flies.

As soon as you’re finished handling the interruption, you have a choice:

• Return to your original task, pushing subsequent tasks further into the future

• Skip the original task to get to the next one on schedule, rescheduling the former one for tomorrow

If it’s not obvious, the first option is a formula for not leaving work at 5:00. If more than one arbitrarily scheduled task is interrupted, the cascading effect is magnified. The second option rests on the illusion that you’ll have more time tomorrow. Even if that were true, you’ll still have more interruptions tomorrow.

Every time you schedule an action with no authentic time dependency, you create an agreement with yourself. If the action is executed on time, everything’s fine, but if not, you reduce the integrity of your calendar as a focus tool — especially if the margin for error reflects a pattern. The lack of focus is exacerbated by the fact that you have to sort through the calendar to distinguish between commitments and aspirations.

The solution? Stick to hard landscape. Don’t put anything else on your calendar. Use the whitespace to work from your untimed action lists. Use your calendar for information, not motivation.

The big rock exception that proves the rule

What about the big rocks? If it’s Sunday, there’s no adverse consequence to drafting a business plan in the evening versus the morning. But it’s a high-focus activity that’s certain to take at least a few hours, so what’s the harm in scheduling it?

None at all. In fact, it’s a good idea to schedule anything that will take lots of time and concentration. There’s no contradiction, only an inversion of the external commitment. Instead of scheduling yourself to be available for a particular person or group, here you’re doing the opposite: scheduling yourself to be unavailable for others. As a writer, it’s my job to be unavailable to others during set times when I need to work on an extended article, so I block out that time on my calendar — even when there’s no deadline.

The point is to avoid turning activities into blocks of time that get arranged into a list, unless you’re comfortable with the domino effect that results from this sequence being interrupted. Unschedule those arbritrary activities, and make your calendar functional again by restoring the whitespace.

(Photo by Multiple Personalities)

Looks like Ben Stein has found an even more pathetic intellectual cul-de-sac than creationism (ahem, intelligent design). It warmed my heart to learn, during his grumpy defense of the yoke, that only six percent of men still wear neckties. “Now, the tie’s situation has become so dire that the American Dress Furnishings Association — the trade group that represents the tie business — announced it was shutting down.” Perhaps the Creator’s hand is at work after all.

There’s a problem with the common advice to focus on priorities. Something is always a priority relative to something else. If you had nothing else to do in the world but one task, you wouldn’t need to “focus” on it as a priority; the action would be self-evident, as it is in life-threatening emergencies. As soon as other things enter your head, focus requires effort.

One way of maintaining focus is to simply develop the discipline to stick with your current task and ignore new thoughts and external interruptions. Or it may be necessary to handle the interruption first, then return to the original task. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or choice.

The third option is to use a collection tool to capture either the interruption or to “bookmark” the current task. Remember, you don’t need to think through what you capture at the moment you’re capturing it. You can always process (clarify the outcomes and actions of) these reminders at a later stage.

Capturing interruptions

If, while you’re working, you suddenly think of something not related to your current work, an internal interruption, trying to ignore it will perpetuate the thought as a loop. It’s like trying not to think of pink elephants: you have to think of them in order to know what not to think about. The more a thought remains implicit, the more attention it will consume. This is why it’s important to collect any thought that has your attention, not just work-related thoughts.

Internal interruptions are the most insidious type, since they’re invisible until they’re recorded, but external interruptions also need to be handled. If the interruption comes in on a piece of paper, it can obviously go into an in-basket. If the interruption is verbal, the key information can be captured on a piece of paper, then thrown in the in-basket.

With IM, if you choose to remain visible to others online, treat message notifications just like verbal interruptions: write the key information down, reply with some version of “I’ll get back to you” (unless the answer to a question is immediately obvious), then throw your note in your in-basket. I recommend using the in-basket rather than relying on trying to remember to look at your IM client and reply to the last message.

Bookmarking

In many office situations, the thing that’s interrupting your current task may actually be more important than the task that’s being interrupted. This is a judgment call that only you can make. If you decide that what you’re already doing takes precedence, capture the interruption and return to the current task. If you decide that the interruption requires your attention, “bookmark” it by putting the interrupted work in your in-basket so that after the interruption is handled, you can pick up exactly where you left off.

You’re writing up a purchase order and the phone rings. It’s a customer inquiring about a late delivery. Since you’ve decided to take the call, you put the PO and any related paperwork in your in-basket, and begin taking notes on the customer’s problem (the order number, contact information, etc.). Once the customer is off the phone, you process this input as you would any in-basket item, writing down the defined outcome on your project list and the next action on your action list; or you hand the problem off to customer service if that’s an option.

If another interruption occurs before you’re able to process the former one — say you get another phone call — you repeat the same procedure: you put the notes from the previous call in your in-basket and take notes on the new call. Then you process these inputs in reverse order until you get to your original task.

Collection tools

Things often occur to us in places where we can’t act on them. Family issues might come to mind while you’re consulting with a client. Client issues might come to mind while you’re having dinner with your spouse. Getting these thoughts out of your head is simple to do, but it requires having the right tools in the right place at the right time.

1. Junior legal pads. When you’re at your desk, having a junior legal pad ready for action at all times will lower the bar for deciding whether or not something is worth writing down. Hint: if you’re deliberating on writing it down, it’s worth writing down, even if you decide three minutes later to cross it out. You can either write down new items as a running list on a single page, then throw them in your in-basket, or you can write down each item on a separate sheet. While the one-item-per-page approach consumes far more paper, many people find that processing each item is more focused when they’re only viewing one item at a time.

2. Index cards. Index cards are highly versatile. There’s better suited to the one-item-at-a-time approach, they’re portable enough to fit in your pocket, they can be clipped to other documents as information supplements, and a cluster of them can be rearranged on a desk surface for a more topographical view of your project.

3. Computer applications. These can range from simple utilities like Notepad or TextEdit to more robust tools like Evernote or DevonTHINK. I used to use Notepad, which I assigned to a hotkey (Ctrl-Alt-N) whenever I needed to write something down. I eventually stopped doing this, since I was already using physical notepads and in-baskets, and the addition of virtual buckets diffused by attention. Even when I was still using the Palm Desktop as my primary organizing tool, I made it a rule to do all of my capturing on paper; that way I knew if there was paper still around, there was processing still left to do.

But there’s no reason you can’t operate in a similar fashion entirely with digital tools. For instance, if you might use Outlook as your task manager, but use a text editor to open a capture.txt file whose contents you process into Outlook until the file is back to empty.

4. Notebooks. The key to making notebooks work as capture tools is to make sure you have a clear protocol for processing what you collect. I recommend putting your notebook in your in-basket whenever you return to your desk, and treat it the same way you would other paperwork. Once you’ve processed an entry on a page, either cross it out or apply a bracket at the margin to make it clear that the item has been entered into your system.

5. Notetaker wallets. These are otherwise regular wallets for holding cash and cards, but with a notepad and a silo for holding a miniature or retractable pen. These are great, because you’re never without the means to write something down, either for yourself or others. The Wenger Mini Pad Folio and the David Allen Company’s Notetaker Wallet are a couple of common models. To fashion a notetaker wallet on the cheap, you can stick a dozen light bond index cards cut to size in one or two of your current wallet’s credit card receptacles; but you’ll need to carry the pen separately.

6. Voice recorders. Voice recorders are especially useful in situations where you don’t have two hands available to capture notes. When I’m driving, I use a Panasonic voice recorder to jot things down, despite having voice recording capability on my phone. The cell phone requires a press-and-hold operation that I find just distracting enough to potentially interfere with my driving, whereas the dedicate voice recorder has a straightforward one-touch operation. I make it a rule not to leave my car until I process any voice notes (I usually only have a couple), but some people will literally put their voice recorder in their in-basket. An increasingly popular option is to use a free service like Jott, which allows you to call an automated voice mail that transcribes and emails your voice note, along with the original audio file as an attachment.

7. Organizers. To make paper day planners work effectively, be sure to keep your task and calendar entries separate from raw collection. Have a separate tab just for blank or rule note paper, or a notepad. As with notebooks, make sure any processed entries are crossed out or otherwise denoted as processed, so that old material doesn’t get mixed in with the new. Ideally, if you’re using a loose leaf organizer, or have a notepad with perforated sheets, eliminate the sheets with processed items as soon as possible.

8. Mnemonic visualization. If you happen to be a situation where a capture tool simply isn’t available, you can often jog your memory to vividly imagining a scenario that will trigger a reminder where it needs to occur. For instance, if I realize I need to recharge my MP3 player, I might visualize coming back to my desk and having the player’s charging cable lash out and zap me like a snake.

It sounds silly, and is, but the exaggerated scenario creates an anchor point. It only takes a moment to imagine the exaggerated event, but you can forget it immediately afterwards. Once you’re in the environment of the trigger (in my case, the desk), the memory will come back automagically. Even if you don’t practice mnemonics regularly, you’ll find that you can recall these anchors about 80% of the time.

What about the other 20%? C’est la vie. That’s the point of having a ubiquitously available capture tool.