My desk was my inbox till I started doing GTD. The book tells you: buy four plastic inboxes.

I did it. It worked.

Next step, I bought four metal mesh inboxes for my desk at home.

Are you keeping up with your weekly (or more often) review? I actually had to set up a second "at-home" review for all my mail, errands, home projects, etc. It takes work to keep ahead on that too, but I don't have the piles that I used to have, and that's great.

But part of GTD is prioritizing the processing of the stuff, because collecting alone isn't enough -- it's just a solid first step. Maybe you need to make a time to process your stuff.

Upon implementing GTD, my office became a thing of beauty. Empty desktop? Got it. Files organized? Yep. I never misplace ANYTHING. At work, that is.

Then I go home.

I have no problem with the CONCEPT of processing my house-as-in-box. My albatross is the hundreds of hours it will likely take to actually accomplish such a feat.

Baby steps, I suppose.

You're correct -- I'm not processing often enough.

But the prob with my desk is that it isn't just catching "desk stuff." Right now it has several books, two or three items I bought online that need to be returned in addition to the "desk stuff." Often it's worse than that. I go through the living room and end up with a pile of stuff that has nothing to do with my office at all, but end up putting it on my desk to sort through later.

Once the desk is piled up and the living room isn't, I find myself sitting down in the living room with my laptop to work, and the desk doesn't get processed.

I realize it's bad habits and not processing that causes the prob. My question is, does anybody have a better "in-box" idea for stuff that needs to be handled (ex: returned to online shopping place)? , books, other things that may not actually have anything to do with my office, but I do end up processing them here because here is where all the stuff is that I use. (Printer, tape, packing tape, etc.)

Desk seems obvious at the moment, but then I'm still in the same place I was when the return-items (for example) were on the floor in the living room. I'm not ready to take care it right now, and so now instead of on the floor, they're on my desk!

I have a separate inbox system at home and treat all of my home activities the same as my work activities, with projects, to-dos, etc. So, when stuff goes from home to work, it's part of a specific project that gets done on a specific timeline with specific daily goals. Then I just have a generic home inbox at work that collects stuff that goes to home from work, and I take that home weekly and process those contents with my home inbox in my weekly home review. This actually works really well, and helps me stay on top of letters, bills, things that need to be cleaned, magazines, etc.

I have a second desk (a table) for this things. Let's check: you process your return-items (does not take a lot of time, just enter the actions into your list), then where dou you put these things physically? You need a place. It can't be your inbox, the books are processed already. Maybe an "out"-section on your bookshelf? A board devoted to books you have to return to the lib... ...or to the seller?

Thanks, CPU. That's a thought. I should be able to clear some shelf space.

Pooks,

Thanks for bringing this forward. I have exactly the same issue. But I too do not keep up my stuff as often as I should

I obviously have two different issues -- one, I need a better place to "collect" stuff that doesn't belong on my desk.

Two, I need to process more often.

One takes some thinking. The other takes some doing.