The Mess of Gathering Points
Picking a single system and trusting it
It’s in a Safe Place
In most GTD books, it is suggested to only have a handful of gathering points. A gathering point is simply a place that your stuff collects. These gathering points can be counter space, email, voicemail, paper notes, digital notes, task lists, etc. Over time our gathering points exponentially increase and soon our stuff disappears into one of the 100s of possible locations we could have placed it. Jokingly my mom often says, after being unable to locate an important object, “I know I put it in a safe place!”.
Since spending time finding your stuff is unproductive, GTD principles suggest that there should only be a few gathering points, instead of an untenable mess of piles everywhere.
If you have 100 places that your stuff gathers, you are doing it wrong.
A Beautiful ( Clear ) Mind
Another principle in GTD is that your mind should not be burdened by all the stuff in your head — such as tasks and ideas. Remember that million dollar idea you thought of this morning? Probably not. Had you written it down you could further explore your idea. There goes your dreams of driving a Tesla.
In order to achieve a clear mind you must dump everything out into a trusted system and keep it out of your brain. Tasks should go to your tasks gathering point, notes should go into your notes gathering point and so on.
Easy, right? Nope.
The Curse of Riches
I can collect almost anything into my Mac and iPhone, that blessing is incredible. The curse of this blessing is that most of us have technological hoards when it comes to our gathering points.
How are we a mess? Let’s try an experiment . . .
Where are all of your notes?
On your iPhone are they in Notes.app, Evernote, or maybe Vesper?
On your Mac are they in a mess of .txt files, NVAlt, Notes.app, or perhaps random emails to yourself?
In meatspace are they scattered across a sea of sticky notes, random scraps of paper or your Franklin Covey day planner?
Beyond notes, where are your tasks? your emails? your communications? your ideas? your journal? your music? your photos? your passwords?
Starting to see the problem here?!
Each category of stuff has the potential to be spread across 2 or more systems. Your poor brain is loaded with all of this stuff, and it has to keep track of the myriad of physical and digital gathering points you have spun up.
How many times have you felt frustrated because you thought you knew where something was, only to discover it was not there? How many times did you erase your phone and then realize you forgot to backup one of your gathering points?
This constant frustration is simply the fact that you cannot trust your system and your gathering points. Honestly, how could you trust them when time and time again they have failed you?
To Trust Again
The first step to regaining trust in your workflow is to simply evaluate your gathering points. What systems or apps are not working for you? Which habits need to change in order for you to always know exactly where your stuff is?
Using the example of notes again, let’s list out all the places your notes gather. For me, I had my notes in a Moleskine, Notes.app, Vesper, and Evernote.
Evaluating each, we should be able to clearly select a single gathering point.
For me, I was constantly losing my Moleskine, and I really didn’t like carrying it around with me. Notes.app synced across Mac and iPhone, but it is ugly, and it lacks tagging. Vesper is gorgeous and has tags, but it does not sync to my Mac, and to backup I’d have to manually export those notes. Backing up notes is a task I don’t want to remember or deal with. Evernote has tags, sync, sharing, and it works across many devices.
For me, Evernote was the obvious and best choice.
The last step is to collect everything from your other failed systems into your new single trusted gathering point. I spent an entire weekend finding and scanning every scrap of paper I felt I should keep. I also dug out every single digital note and painstakingly put them all into Evernote. It wasn’t an easy task, and at points during the process I felt like I was wasting my time.
The Value of a Single Gathering Point
The true value of a single gathering point came when I sat down with my CPA to do my taxes. He asked if I had some random government document to finish his job. I paused, and launched Evernote and sure enough I was able to find it within seconds. Last tax season, I would have had to apologize to my CPA, go home and proceed to tear apart my house in hopes that I could find it.
Multiple gathering points are a guaranteed failure, unless of course you are an amazing savant. We are so blessed with technological riches that it is hard not to download every new note-taking application that comes to market. Yet, there is so much value and productivity unleashed when we finally pick a single system and make the habit to only use that system. Only when we pick a single gathering point can we truly be productive.
