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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.

mcnicks's picture

Actually my team and I...

Actually my team and I already use RT for handling helpdesk queries and the like. It is an excellent piece of free software, and it is highly configurable too. I think that my question was less about how to track all of these interrupts and queries, and more about how much or how far I should process them as they come up.

I suppose I should try to educate the rest of the staff to filter their requests through the helpdesk if they need an immediate response to a critical problem. Whoever is on the helpdesk will be able to ping me if something serious comes up. In a more machavellian sense, it might be useful for me to implement exactly what I want to do: note the issue, put it into my inbox and process it at the end of the day. People will eventually work out that having immediate access to me will not guarantee an immediate solution to their problems.

But this is probably a bit off-topic because it is more about managing expectations than implementing GTD.

 
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