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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.

kenzi's picture

People will eventually work out...

mcnicks wrote:
People will eventually work out that having immediate access to me will not guarantee an immediate solution to their problems.

Merlin mentions this idea in his email guidelines saying that if you respond to email immediately people will think that they can better get things from you this way, and that will muck up your in-box. He suggests not always answering right away (set your 'check email' thingy to 1 hour or more) and train people, a la Pavlov, to either not email you so much or to find another way to contact you.

I have a job like that where I am always putting out fires, and have to drop the other stuff I am working on to do so. It's incredibly frustrating because I am at the bottomof the ladder and can't really fight it; if I were to pass the buck or ignore the requests I would be out on my behind. I guess everyone goes through that, but once you rise in the hierarchy you can get away with telling people to back off and wait for you to have time for them.

 
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