We’re going to take the massive piles of stuff you generated with your brain dump (which in GTD terminology is called the In Box or In Basket) and sort it into buckets.

Since you can implement GTD with anything: cocktail napkins, bits of birch bark, tar paper and chalk, you could use real buckets for this, but I personally use the virtual folders in my ToDo application. You could use folders on your pc, nodes in an outliner, branches on a mind map, or whatever, as long as there are distinct boundaries where you can separate one thing from another.

Official GTD implementation suggests that you use these buckets at a minimum: Next Actions, Calendar, Projects, Reference, Someday/Maybe, and Waiting For.

Next Actions

This category is for things you know you have to do, whether it’s a one-off or the next step toward completing a larger project. It’s important to write these using action verbs that command you  to take a single specific physical action: buy new shoes, clean the litter pan, fix the porch light, decide on dice mechanic for The Flowers of Evil, buy Buttermilk to make Paneer, call Mom about dinner Thursday night. If there is more than one step to the action, or it has to be done at a certain time or on a certain date, it belongs in Projects or in your Calendar.

Just because it’s on your next action list doesn’t mean you have to do it immediately, but it feels really good to click that little check box and watch it fade to gray.

Calendar

This should be obvious, however, this is not the place to put your daily todo list. If it can be postponed at all, it has no business in your calendar. This is a place to put dates to remember, meetings, appointments.

Projects

Anything that takes more than one step to do is a project. For instance, clean my studio means that I have to take out the overflowing trash boxes, recycle all the empty soft drink cans, re-shelve any stray books, organize my art supplies, and sort through the multiple boxes of tangled and sticky audio cables to see which, if any, I should toss.

I personally break down my projects into tiny little steps because it’s a useful procrastination method, but I’d imagine that if you just list the name of the project, you’d probably be able to figure out what the most logical next action is anyway.

Reference

Reference is stuff that doesn’t really require any action but is nice to keep on hand. I keep a shopping list, books I’d like to read, movies I’d like to see, things I’d like to buy, and online resources for graphic design in my reference at the moment.

Someday/Maybe

I explained this to one of my students today as my Christmas List for Life. This is stuff you’d really like to do, but it isn’t crucial. This could be ideas for projects, classes you’d like to take, vacation ideas, things you want to buy.

Waiting For

After you’ve called Trent about buying the yacht and left a rambling, drunken message. You really don’t know if you should bother scraping off the barnacles until you know if he’s coming to take a look. So you mark call Trent re: Yacht off your Next Action list and write waiting for Trent to confirm appt re: Yacht on your Waiting For List. If he hasn’t called you by the next time you review this list, you can put nag Trent re: Yacht on your next action list again.

Other Folders

I have a folder called Fallow Projects (thanks, Merlin!) where I keep any projects I’d like to work on in the future, but are shelved in the present (like my Haunted House game). I also have a folder called IBNU, which stands for Important, But Not Urgent. This should be pretty easy to figure out on your own.

So…

Set aside an hour or two and sort your In Box (brain dump) crap into the correct buckets. Let me know if you’ve come up with any cool tricks or novel folder ideas.