Capture all tasks so you can choose to do the ones that improve you.

Have you noticed, that quite often we do tasks that we remember and miss out the ones that we don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice to do the tasks that are important to our personal and professional life and willingly miss out the one’s that aren’t.

This article is based on the book “Getting things done” with a few tweaks from my own personal experience of trying to fix the above issues for over 3 years.

5 steps of the task management system.

1. Capture
2. Clarify
3. Organize
4. Reflect
5. Engage

In this article, we talk about Capture.

Capture

Note down every idea that comes to your mind or task that lands on your plate.

This idea in itself is so powerful that I have dedicated a separate article detailing the need for capturing, it's titled "How to focus on the task at hand". There we discussed why and how our brain gets distracted. We picked the best strategy to prevent this from affecting our efficiency.

The main advice was to act on our distractions by pausing our current work and quickly noting the distractions, in detail, and in a safe location.

Below I quickly summarize the key points of the previous article and also add on to it.

Why should we capture?

1. Capturing all interrupting ideas and tasks allow us to focus on our current task with maximum RAM.
2. Capturing ideas related to the current task allows our brain to free up RAM which in turn gives us more new ideas and thoughts.
3. If you are meticulous about capturing you won’t miss out on any billion dollar plan.
4. If you don’t capture tasks then you execute the ones that you remember and miss out others that you forget. Instead, if you capture all tasks then you can choose to do the ones that are important to your personal and professional life and willingly miss out the others that aren't.

How do we capture?

We all have a few capturing systems that store our tasks. Try to minimize them.

Capturing systems are places where you reliably store ideas & tasks and regularly clear them. A few of them are:

1. Emails: It is regularly used by your colleagues to assign tasks to you. Replying to a congratulatory mail is also a task as it demands time and attention.
2. Calendar: Colleagues schedule meetings with you.
3. Task managing app (Wunderlist/JIRA/Asana/Trello etc.): You note your to-dos here.
4. Team messaging app (Slack, Skype etc.). Every message demands your time and attention be it less or more.

There could be many more in your life, the fewer the better.

One ring to rule them all:
I personally give importance to my "Task managing app" over other capturing systems. This means, even though I might have tasks on other capturing systems like mail or docs, I will put links and reminders about that in my "Task managing app". So virtually all my to-dos live on my "task managing app"

When to capture?

1. This step is mostly ad-hoc and not in your control. Ideas can come anytime. You can get tasks assigned in meetings or in emails etc.
2. Best practice is to have the necessary capturing tools ready and close by. I have my task manager on both my phone and laptop, around which most of my life revolves.
3. Set aside some time either in beginning or end of the day to capture tasks from your mail.
4. Empty the capturing systems regularly. This doesn’t mean you have executed all tasks, but you have clarified, organized, reflected on and now you are ready to execute.

Example of capture:

The inbox of Wunderlist, a task managing app.

I use Wunderlist, a task managing app as my “one ring to rule them all”. Its first list is called “Inbox”. I dump all my ideas and tasks here and move on. I don’t worry about the organization yet.

Practice for capture:

1. Start using a task management app like the one ring to rule all.
2. Build a habit of dumping all ideas, distracting thoughts etc. in it.
3. Most important: Try not to indulge and engage with the tasks in your list as soon as it comes, instead focus on the goals that you have decided for the day.

Separation of the planning and execution phase reduces the inertia in both.

In future articles, we shall discuss the other steps of the task management system. Stay tuned!!