Capture Every Idea: The First Habit of a Productivity System - Organize with Lists (OWL)

How do you keep track of everything when you’re juggling work, family and a dozen projects at once? In this talk, software developer, musician and father Geoff Peters ( geoffmobile.com ) shares the habit that holds his productivity system together: capturing every idea the moment it comes up.

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Geoff walks through real examples from his own life, including:

– Why you shouldn’t trust your brain to “remember it later”
– Setting up a one-tap shortcut on your phone to add tasks by voice or typing
– How he handles a weekly flood of school emails without missing photo day or a registration deadline
– The small open-source web apps he built to send any email or web page to Microsoft To Do in one click
– Reviewing and sorting what you’ve captured each evening so nothing slips

Whether you use a notebook or an app, this habit makes the rest of your productivity system work.

🔗 Learn more about productivity coaching and workshops: organizewithlists.com
📚 Recommended reading: Getting Things Done by David Allen
✅ Microsoft To Do: www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-365/microsoft-to-do-list-app
💻 Geoff’s one-click task web apps on GitHub: github.com/geoff604/ms-todo-bookmarklet and github.com/geoff604/webpage-to-email

Thanks for watching!
Cheers,
Geoff
geoffmobile.com

#productivity #gettingthingsdone #GTD #todolist #timemanagement

Capture Everything: The First Habit of a Productivity System

I’m a software developer, musician, father and productivity geek. Over the years I’ve seen how much practising and improving personal productivity skills helps me handle a busy life, with many roles and many projects running at once. That’s why I created organizewithlists.com, and why I plan to offer productivity coaching, speaking and corporate workshops.

Most of us juggle several roles and responsibilities. Ignore any one of them and balls start to drop. Planning helps, but before you can plan anything, you need to know what’s on your plate. That starts with one habit: capturing every idea or prompt that comes up during the day.

Don’t trust your brain to remember

Here’s an example. I was walking to work when I remembered I needed to register our son for an acting class starting in a few months. I couldn’t do the registration while walking, so the easy thing would have been to tell myself, “I’ll remember to do that tonight.”

That’s the trap. When your brain surfaces a thought like that, it’s prompting you. If you let it go and hope it comes back later, it often won’t.

Instead, capture it right away. The action can be simple. Jot it on a piece of paper, then build a habit of reviewing your notes every evening and going through everything you thought of that day.

Make capture frictionless

If you’d rather use technology, set up a shortcut on your phone so capturing takes one tap. You can speak a voice memo that transcribes into your to-do list, or type straight into your list’s inbox.

I use Microsoft To Do on my Android phone, with a shortcut on my home screen. One tap opens the “add new task” screen. From there I either tap the microphone and speak the task, or use gesture typing to jot it down. The less effort it takes, the more likely you’ll do it every time.

Handling a flood of emails

Our son is in Grade 3, and every week the school sends emails about upcoming events: special days, photo day (nice clothes and a fresh haircut), forms to bring in, programs to register for and fees to pay. Keeping track of all of it so your child doesn’t miss out is a project in itself, and it can be overwhelming.

When one of these emails arrives and I don’t have time to pick through it, I click one button in my browser to add the email to my to-do list. I wrote a small web app for this. It opens a quick task window and uses the Microsoft Graph API to add a task to Microsoft To Do instantly. It’s open source on my GitHub if you’d like to use something similar.

At work, I have a similar button that sends any web page to my work email inbox. From Outlook, I can add those emails to my work to-do list.

So when a long school newsletter with 30 items lands in my inbox, one click puts it on my list. Later that day, at home, I go through the whole email, copy out every action item and add each one to my to-do list.

Why it works

Once you capture a thought, you no longer have to hold it in your head. At the end of the day, you review everything you collected, sort it into the right lists, add dates and filter your views. With everything in your system, you can apply time management techniques to make sure the actions get done and your goals move forward.

A lifelong practice

Productivity doesn’t switch on like a light. It’s a skill you build over a lifetime. Even if you already handle a high volume of tasks and feel you manage them well, there’s always room to fine-tune. Keep looking for new principles and ideas, and try them in practice. The result is more gets done with less stress.

If you’d like to go further, visit organizewithlists.com or read Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’m also happy to set up a call to talk through coaching or ideas for your own system.