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Advice pls for 'going through my stuff' 1st time
kenzi | Apr 5 2006
I can't put it off any longer and must go through my stuff. I can't move forward with GTD until I do this, but it still feels like a monumental task to me. I am going to start this weekend, and take Monday off to do it. I would greatly welcome any advice you all can give me to help me through this, especially stuff that the book didn't tell you but you wish you knew before you did it. Here is some background: the place where 95% of my stuff is, is my home office/home. I have a job that pays the rent, but it's not an issue with respect to GTD except as an action item: go to work. I run a small business out of my home (I import handicrafts from Morocco and sell them on my website kenzi.com, plus I am a henna artist taking clients at home but also doing house calls. My home office/store is about 40% of my home; I work on my computer, store my inventory, process orders, welcome clients, etc. all at home. I also work on some creative projects, some of them for the business and some just for pleasure. A lot of my business stuff is mixed in with my home stuff, plus I have boxes that I haven't unpacked since I moved 4 years ago, boxes with work stuff in them. I have mapped out my home showing where there are piles of papers (my main organizational nemesis) and also boxes of stuff to go through. I also plan to deal with the personal/home stuff as well as the work stuff since the overall disorganization of my home/home office is making me crazy. I live in a loft with NO closets (though working on buying armoires) and only open space. I have a lot bookshelves and one filing cabinet. I think that I should buy another filing cabinet. I think that is sufficient background, but feel free to ask me any questions. I really welcome any suggestions you may have. 35 Comments
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 It's intimidating at first, and...Submitted by Chrome47 on April 6, 2006 - 6:59am.
It's intimidating at first, and I applaud you for taking a whole weekend to do it. I didn't do it all at once, and I wish I had. For me the processing took several weeks, and I didn't like how it dragged on and on. I really should've done it in one weekend, with a firewall between me and everyone else. You're at the first part of the whole thing: COLLECTING. For me, the whole basement was my inbox. (I had just moved to my parents' house for a while to pay off my student debt while looking for a house. Since I had moved, pretty much everything was already collected.) I think what Pooks did was right: put everything into a big pile in the living room and go from there. So for you, since you live in a loft (I'm envious) everything is already in one place. You might have to put everything in the middle of the room or to one side or something. It might take all day to get everything collected, but again, it might be faster because it's all in one place already. You have to remind yourself not to process things at this point. It may also help to get a legal pad or something and just write down lots of to-dos or goals on it. Empty that brain of yours. You may have 200 things on it in the end, but you'll feel better knowing they're captured and not floating around somewhere in your head. You'll feel a little panicky, but once you start processing, you'll know exactly what you need to do about those 200 to-dos and goals. Once it's all collected, you PROCESS it. Like Berko said, you might want to modify the 2-minute rule to a 30-second rule. I seem to recall that David Allen has people do this on a 2-day weekend so that they can spend the first day collecting, and the second day processing. Don't forget to get giant trash bags. I filled four or five of them when I started my processing. You may be surprised how much stuff is actually junk that you don't need. You'll probably also need a lot of file folders and at least one legal pad. There are a bunch of Advanced Workflow Diagram. It's a well-designed diagram that pretty much sums up the entire book on one page. Just keep in mind that this weekend, you'll be collecting everything into IN, and then PROCESSING everything -- sorting it, finding a home for it, trashing a lot of it, figuring out what to do with things next. A couple of things that I've found extremely important in using GTD:
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