What Collection Tools Do You Use?

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What Collection Tools Do You Use?

You don’t have to be a fan of Getting Things Done to appreciate one of its basic principles, which is known as “collection.” Basically, this means collecting those ideas and thoughts that interfere with your concentration on a task, temporarily placing them somewhere outside your head. According to the theory, once those distracting thoughts are corralled (for later processing), you can proceed in an uninterrupted fashion to finish the job at hand.

The thing is, most of the time it seems to work.

Countless book chapters, articles, blogs, and conversations have addressed the question of exactly why thought collection works, but that’s not what we’re interested in here. We want to know something much more concrete–specifically, what collection tool/s you utilize to quickly remove those concentration-disablers from your head and temporarily store them.

With collection, I personally tend to go analog. At my desk I always have a notebook and pen at the ready–a useful and always-on mechanism for jotting down phone numbers, bits of data, and corralling any thoughts I don’t want to deal with at the moment. When I’m out and about I keep a Moleskine in my purse. If I’m doing research in the field or interviewing someone in person for an article, I use a reporter’s notebook; these are narrow (4″), long (9″), spirally-bound notebooks that can be easily held open in one hand.

I asked a few busy friends about their collection tools and have come up with an interesting list: whiteboard, PDA, pen & paper, word processing program, Moleskine, Jott, index cards (some call this method “the Hipster PDA”), various software programs.

So: now it’s your turn. Please leave a comment, telling us what collection tools you use and why. –SR

**(P. S.–Sometime soon we’ll ask you about your processing tools–what you use when you’re ready to deal with the thoughts you’ve collected, turning them into Tasks and Action Items.)

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© Suzanne Rodriguez
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