Capture is one of those famous GTD ideas that is both great, but unexamined, somewhat overbaked and silly - perhaps overbaked and silly are synonymous. I’m being redundant, but that’s my point because I know that when we have important thoughts, we have them again, and while where supposed to have a trusted system outside our mind, we don’t and we never will.

So trust the little fail safe, write down with enough context any thought worth writing down, but trust the fact that you’ll think it again, and don’t write it down if you don’t have the time to, the place to, the system to, or the elements of context that make writing things down productive. And guess what? If you don’t remember again, it wasn’t that important or life enriching.

A very funny thing happened as I typed this. Will Power’s Adventures In Success played two consecutive times on iTunes. Imagine the odds, my mind boggles. In any case, yeah, but, yeah.

My favorite example of this is from my former place of employment.

The secretary had one of those black plastic spinners on her desk and she’d stick notes in it. Often we’d get a note for a different person, but my favorite one was clearly for me.

It was one of those pink “While You Were Out” notes and it had my name at the top and down below she had scrawled:

PLEASE CALL

No, by the time I got the message she had no idea who I was supposed to call.

No, I never did figure it out (they never called back, or if they did they never said anything about having left a message for me).

That started the process of me convincing my boss that we really needed a true voicemail system, which we got some months later.

If you haven’t yet seen the film “Once,” do so as soon as possible. I saw it in my local theater, and loved it. “Falling Slowly” deserves to be nominated for the Oscar for best song.

I’m not sure if the film’s soundtrack qualifies for “best score”, but if so, it should get a nomination for that as well.

Here’s a good/bad example from just last week:

“SEND TO RON” — triple-underlined too. I had to call Ron to ask him what he was expecting me to send.

Another one that I remember from last year:

“USE BLUE CIRCLE”

I never did figure that one out. (shrug)

My $0.02 CDN:

Not that it happens anymore (being a 43 Folders reader), but Reverse Look-Up (http://www.411.com/reverse_phone) is a good tool to help solve those 10-digit mysteries. Sometimes the pen is quicker than the brain.

I’ve found some short codes arising naturally for common contexts. Looking at the top of my inbox right now, I see

Planet Earth BBC NFX

That NFX means netflix to me, so I know this is a DVD that someone recently recommended, and when I process my inbox (or more likely, work out of it, since I’m still getting the hang of firewalling that time) I know to put it in my queue.

I’m a developer for a GTD application for teams called Mentat.

We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on ubiquitous task capture, and provide fairly easy ways to come back and annotate a captured task, but even with our own system, I find myself looking at bizarre, two word tasks that mean nothing to me later.

Providing a space for additional information might be a good way to go. Actually, we do this for closing tasks in team projects and task reassignments (a HUD pops up and asks you for a comment to provide context to your action).

We all need the discipline to provide some context to what we are doing, but it seems like tools can also help by gently prompting us for more information.

-Daniel

When I jot down a future action, I always make sure it’s spelled correctly (important with names) and that it has a noun and a verb. If I just wrote down “Pen” I might not know later whether I need to return someone’s pen, buy a new pen, find my beloved Cross pen, or build a pen for my dogs.

I laughed out loud at this post, because it’s just so me. Glad to see I’m not the only one. I’ve really been trying to work on this over the past six months or so, and mostly succeeded, though I still find the odd little scribbled messages from time to time.

I’m a collection manager in a public library, so I take a lot of phone calls from both patrons and vendors. When I take an incoming call, I now write down the caller’s name immediately, instantly, before continuing with the conversation. If I resolve all issues on the phone, I may have a list of eighteen contextless names to throw away at the end of the day - but if I don’t, I know I won’t end up with three random vendor phone numbers, “call George” (why?), “renew Jane’s books” (which Jane?) and three titles that maybe someone just suggested I review, but might have actually been specific requests by persons now lost to the mists of memory.

I read this post and saw some parallels with my own situation. I’m often overwhelmed, and trying with all my might to stay afloat, as it were. So, sometimes I cut corners, fail to give myself tips on how to restart if I get interrupted, and the like.

I used to think I was giving my future self all kinds of credit to be able to figure things out, or remember crucial details.

Now, I’m realizing that my PRESENT self is actually sometimes giving my FUTURE self the middle finger. By not stacking the deck and giving my future self the chance to succeed, I’m undermining myself. If I have to spend a lot of time reverse engineering my work to a specific point, I’ve just given away time that will never come back. And frankly, that’s f’ed up.

So, now I write lots of little notes on projects with momentary thoughts and tips for making sense of the work that has been done; generally being nice to my future self.

It helps.

Absolutely required. It’s the difference between data and knowledge - one is just bits (or atoms), the other is something you can use. I’ve been doing this for years using a simple text file and a wiki-like markup convention. I have dozens of tags on topics like procrastination and multitasking, and macros to make search and auto-completion extremely rapid.

Unfortunately, the current state of the art doesn’t match this very simple tool yet, IMHO. I’ve looked at probably 100 tools over the years, and they usually miss at least a few critical features, e.g., cross-linking between entries/notes, marking up separate sections/words of a single entry, and rapid creation and auto-completion of tags/categories.

I am notorious for the one-line-without-context note that is inscrutable 48 hours later:

“Statins” I think meant write a post about statin drugs and melanoma. But who knows?

Nice use of “frippery” by the way.