This time we are advancing more into the second half of the book, which is probably the most useful, since David Allen's advice becomes increasingly practical.
Collection means going through every storage area in every location. Be assured that if you give yourself at least a couple of hours to tackle this part, you can grab the major portion of things outstanding. And you can even capture the rest by creating relevant placeholding notes, e.g. "deal with closet in the entrance hall" or "clean up basement area cupboard". In the real world, you probably won't be able to keep your stuff 100% collected all of the time. If you're like most people, you'll move too fast and be engaged in too many things during the course of a week to get all your ideas and commitments captured outside your head. But it should become and ideal standard that keeps you motivated to consistently "clean house" of all the things about your work and life that have your attention.
There are very practical reasons to gather everything before you start processing it:
- it's helpful to have a sense of the volume of stuff you have to deal with;
- it lets you know where the "end of the tunnel" is; and
- when you're processing and organizing, you don't want to be distracted psychologically by an amorphous mass of stuff that might still be "somewhere". Once you have all the things that require your attention gathered in one place, you'll automatically be operating from a state of enhanced focus and control.
The first activity is to search your physical environment for anything that doesn't belong where it is, the way it is, permanently, and put it into your in-basket. You will come across many smaller and larger items that nag at you, but that you haven't decided either to deal with or to drop entirely from your list of open loops. If you cannot physically put something in the in-basket, then write a note on a piece of letter-size plain paper to represent it. For example, if you have a poster or other piece of artwork behind the door to your office, just write "artwork behind door" on a letter-size piece of paper and put the paper in the in-basket.
Once you feel that you've collected all the physical things in your environment that need processing, you'll want to collect anything else that may be residing in your psychic RAM. What has your attention that isn't represented by something already in your in-basket? This is where the stack of plain paper really comes into play. I recommend that you write out each thought, each idea, each project or thing that has your attention, on a separate sheet of paper. In this instance, it's much better to overdo this process in terms of quantity than to risk missing something important.
If your head is empty of everything, personally and professionally, then your in-basket is probably quite full, and likely spilling over. Then you are ready for the next step, processing, which we will discuss in the following chapter.
Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.104-118.
