[abutler76]

hello!

so i'm an avid omnifocus and gtd user, but i'm having a little problem with upkeep of my digital inboxes.

i have a physical inbox on my desk, which is great. it is the one location everything goes into, so it's easy for me to work through and keep an eye on so it doesn't overflow when life gets busy.

but in my digital life i have many inboxes: my e-mail, my browser bookmarks, my mint.com account (for finances), evernote (for my ideas and thoughts), my downloads folder, and of course my omnifocus inbox. these are all of the digital inputs in my life that collect throughout my day and need processing.

so what i'm finding is that when i get really busy, i have a very hard time getting myself to check every single one of these inboxes. it's the whole 'out of sight, out of mind' problem that i don't have with my physical inbox because it's all in one place right in front of me on my desk.

a solution that would work for me is having all of these digital inboxes on one desktop (using leopard's spaces with two monitors). but the problem is that if i spend all this time positioning the windows, then when i quit or restart the computer i'd have to re-position the windows all over again. i haven't been able to find a software solution for this.

does anyone else have this problem, or has anyone come up with a solution to making their digital inboxes easier to consolidate and process?

thanks!

[Brian]

I have daily/weekly/monthly/yearly repeating actions that remind me to check stuff like this. The actions become available in the morning, and go overdue at 6pm on whatever day they started on.

I don't always get those items processed precicesly on schedule, but the overdue actions in OmniFocus certainly prevent me from forgetting about them. :-)

[abutler76]

thanks for the reply! it's not that i need reminders to clean out the inboxes (i use omnioutliner as a checklist for my daily/weekly/monthly reviews, which works great), it's just that the thought of having to go to 7 different places to clean out my digital inboxes is usually enough to prevent me from doing it when things in life get busy.

i love omnifocus and gtd, they've totally changed my life. but i've been working with them long enough now to find those areas in my system where things get backed up when life gets really crazy. so i'm trying to find some solutions to simplify things and prevent backlog. does that make sense?

[ianbetteridge]

One option is to pick a tool which lets you email anything and everything to it.

In my case, I use Evernote to consolidate all my electronic inboxes. Everything gets emailed to Evernote: Web clippings, emails I want to save, emails I need to create projects/next actions for, links - you name it. Because Evernote can hold/parse files too, it's a great storage locker for electronic stuff which needs filing.

Then a couple of time a day (depending on how busy I am) I go through Evernote's inbox and file/delegate it, or convert it into an action or project in Omnifocus as required.

[abutler76]

it's not a bad idea to consolidate even more into evernote.....

[Lucas]

A couple of things: first, when checking these types of inboxes, I just use the send to OF service to get it into the OF inbox. I think it might make it easier for you if you are sure to separate clearing out the inbox and actually doing anything that those inboxes call for.

Second, I would put checking these inbox into some sort of "low attention internet" context. I use this kind of context for stuff like this that I can do while listening to music or (like today) watching football and it makes it a lot easier.