Today’s Homemaker

[New to Getting Things Done? Start at the beginning!]

Congratulations if you’ve made it this far! There’s not a whole lot more to it, actually. In the upcoming days, I’ll be giving you some ideas for tweaking your plan, but you’ve got the basics down. Good for you.

Some of you might be thinking Simple? This plan is far from simple! Well, you’re right. The first week requires a lot of thought. It requires you to empty your brain and figure out what you actually need/want to do in your life. Your life is not simple, so it takes some time to go through and examine it in full.

But there’s good news — the rest of it is simple. If you look at your Daily Plan, you’ll notice that at the end there are two things that you have to do every day (well, three if you’re picky): process your inbox/update your lists, and make your daily plan for the next day. We’ve already gone over the daily plan (I like to do things backwards, see). Now for the rest.¹

Process your inbox

We haven’t talked much about your inbox yet. Remember when I told you that to get started, you’d need a box and some small pieces of scrap paper? This is your inbox system. Throughout the day, people are going to ask you to do things, you’re going to get ideas, and you’re going to receive papers that need processing. You need to be able to capture all of this stuff as soon as it comes to you.

Much of that can go in your small notebook (which, by the way, will also have your Daily Plan on it.) In a way, that notebook is also an “inbox.” You can write down anything you want in it, to be processed at the end of the day.

But if you’re at your desk or if you run across a piece of mail or a paper that needs to be dealt with, the best thing to do is throw it in your inbox. Those little scrap pieces of paper are great for scribbling something on and tossing in the box.

Update your lists

As you process your inbox, you will need to update your lists. This is pretty self-explanatory. Examine your Project List and see if anything can be crossed off or needs to be added. Look at your Next Action lists and cross off anything that you completed. Add anything that needs to be done.

As long as you keep writing down things as they occur to you, your system will stay intact pretty easily if you schedule some time each day to keep it current. I spend about ten minutes on this every day — it’s really not much.

Alright…gotta go feed the kiddos some lunch. You’d think they had a tapeworm or something. Since I’m done explaining the basics, I’m going to open up this Getting Things Done series to your questions. Email me at sarahjoy AT todayshomemaker DOT com or leave a comment below.

GTD day nine: Adding more lists to your binder >>

1. I would suggest, however, to schedule a day once a month to look deeper at your plan and see what needs tweaking. [↩]