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How to manage actions as they come up?

I am reasonably happy with the notion of generating actions from incoming items or from projects but I am a bit confused about how I should deal stuff that appears during the day. For example, somebody might come into my office at work and say, "the printer is not working". Should I process that on the spot, decide that it is an action and write it into my @Work context? Or should I consider it as an input, write it on a bit of paper and throw it in my inbox? Ideally I would be happier with the latter, but how well that would work in practice depends on how often I review my inbox, versus the importance / priority of the potential tasks that the input represents.

To continue the example, if the seemingly innocuous printer problem is actually preventing the submission of a multi-million pound grant application, then it becomes far more important. But while that bit of paper is sitting in my inbox, I will not get around to processing it until the end of the day, or maybe the end of the week.

I guess I may be looking for too much intellegence in the system. Perhaps I should be able to know intuitively whether the inputs that arrive during the day are incredibly urgent? I could always ask the person how critical the problem is for them, but that feels very much like processing.

I would be interested to hear how other people handle this - the problem is actually more to do with being forced into a responsive, event driven mode of work rather than with GTD specifically.

emory's picture

I am reasonably happy with...

mcnicks wrote:
I am reasonably happy with the notion of generating actions from incoming items or from projects but I am a bit confused about how I should deal stuff that appears during the day. For example, somebody might come into my office at work and say, "the printer is not working". Should I process that on the spot, decide that it is an action and write it into my @Work context? Or should I consider it as an input, write it on a bit of paper and throw it in my inbox? Ideally I would be happier with the latter, but how well that would work in practice depends on how often I review my inbox, versus the importance / priority of the potential tasks that the input represents.

What you may want to consider is that it will be more efficient, and better for you, if you can track incoming requests and then process them accordingly.

Use Request Tracker for all service requests. This is also useful for employee review time, since you'll have a log of all the tasks you've done.

And you can easily commit "projects" to projects and feature-adds to someday/maybe and better serve your customers. In this case your customers are basketcases in the office, but if you streamline that aspect of Getting Stuff and treat that as an inbox, you may be much happier.

 
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