11. Capture Tools in GTD

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

Morten: Hi and welcome to episode number 11 of the Getting Things Done podcast from the GTD Nordic. I am Morten Røvik and I'm here with my friend and colleague Lars Rothschild Henriksen. Hello, Lars.

Lars: Hi, Morten. Happy to be back today. To do another episode with you. And for those of you listening for the first time, we have decided to create this podcast to support you in, in using the GTD methodology and help you become more productive and less stressed and really to be, to be more present with whatever you are engaging in. And we hope that you find these episodes valuable. If this is your first episode, or if you want a refresher about the basics of GTD, I would recommend you go back and listen to the first episodes that we released, episodes 1 through 6.

Morten: Yes, that's a good, good idea if you want to refresh or relearn GTD. But today's topic is we return to episode 2, and we are going to talk about capture again, and more the practical aspect of capturing. Loris, why don't you Take us back to why is it important to capture? Why, why is it important to get things out of your head when they pop up?

Lars: Well, that really is the basics of the Getting Things Done methodology, or at least a good starting point, is that to use your mind for having ideas, not for holding them. So having tools available for this is really obviously a requirement so you can get this stuff out of your head. And it's important to have tools available regardless of which situation you're in. So get it out of your head as soon as it has your attention. You don't know if you'll be able to get back to that thought, great idea, whatever it might be. So today's topic would be about the different capture tools. And you as a listener, your task will be to really think through which situations you often find yourself in and which tools would be suitable for you to have in each of those situations.

Morten: Exactly. And the basic idea here is, of course, not to use your head as a system to remember everything that you need to remember, to get it out of your head as soon as possible. And the other thing is that you use your— if you use your head as a system, you are bogging your mental capacity down with a lot of 'don't forgets,' and this is not good use of your beautiful brain, which is made for having good ideas and being creative. If you get them out of your head the most efficient way in the situation where you see them pop up, you will be more effective and more productive. You will do more of the right stuff. So, Lars, we have a listener send in a question. Could you read the question?

Lars: So that's actually the reason for this, this episode. Thanks so much for your question. And for anyone else listening out there, if you have any questions, podcast@gtdnordic.dk is the address to Shoot us an email if you have any questions. You'll find that address in the show notes. But yeah, we got a question for capturing while driving and running. So if we— I obviously drive a lot around for various presentations and seminars. I also do a fair bit of running. So this question was perfect for me. Before I go into those ones, I just wanted to take a step back and just capture tools in general. What do I use?. So for me, paper is a good starting point. People often expect that I'm all in on the digital side, but really I've only worked with a couple of people that were basically 100% digital. The rest of us mere mortals will have to have a mix of both digital and analog capture tools. And paper works very well for me, both as just, you know, a nice notebook that I use for capturing notes. And also I have a notepad right here on my desk. And I also have my trusted Capture wallet to get that stuff out of my head. Exactly. And on the digital side, for me, if you were giving me a call, the program I would open to capture meeting notes or any notes from a call or anything else that would go into Evernote for me. For me, that structure works very well. It seems for me to be best to— and that's a bit of history as well why I use that tool, but it seems to work well for me to get that stuff out of my head and into Evernote because I can easily search it out there. I don't have to navigate any complex structures. It's very search-based and that works really well for me when it comes to these kinds of notes.

Morten: What about you? No, I am, you know, a very writing person, handwriting person for taking notes, you know, capturing notes is something I use. I've tried a lot of different tools. I've tried Livescribe, Livescribe pen and paper. I tried the reMarkable, the latter there, reMarkable is a good tool for writing your digital notes. And my last testing tool is Rocketbook, and this is just a very simple, rather thin A5— you can have them A4 and a notepad size— for taking notes with a normal Pilot Frixion pen. And when you've finished your note-taking, you can then use the Rocketbook app and you can send automatically to different sources like Box.com, Dropbox, Evernote, OneNote, all the major players are there. And you can also transcribe the title of the note so that it goes into the right folder if you want. This is a tool I'm testing, but this is for my meeting notes first and foremost. And I have a little trick, is that I have— when I make a square in front of a line inside the notes, it —what do you say—a message to me that I need to do something about this. And then I tick off at the bottom of the page "Send this to OmniFocus." So it goes to my trusted OmniFocus list system. So it shows up in my inbox, and then I can look at it and, "Ah, of course, this I need to capture. What did I intend to do there?" So that's an elegant way of doing it. But I also use my Capture, my business Capture wallet, which we've actually remade now with David Allen Company's blessing. This is the old David Allen note-taker wallet. We've made a replica of this in first-grade leather, and you can find them actually at g2dshop.com. This was today's little commercial, but if you want to find very easy to use, small, very thin, lightweight wallet which keeps your cards and your notepad and a pen. This is a good place to go. I know a lot of GTDers are looking for tools like this, but they can't find them anywhere anymore. And this is— then I'm sure you will put gddshop.com in the show notes as well. Yeah. So what do you do when you are— and I use my my iPhone with the OmniFocus app. If I have the time to put it straight in, if I have, you know, a quiet spot, I will then clarify and organize things into my trusted system. But what do you do when you— because we both drive quite a lot car, unfortunately. But, well, unfortunately for the environment. And what do you do when you run? I don't run, but you do. So what do you do when you run, Lars?

Lars: Yeah, I'll— I just, before I get to that, I just want to build on what you just said because I think that may be a good trick to those out there listening, having sort of maybe shorthand tricks to help you parse your meeting notes even more easily. So you just mentioned that you had a way to signal to yourself that there was a special thinking about this line. I actually do the same. So if I— normally you would capture without trying to start to analyze what you might do, but of course sometimes your mind will grab onto something and come up with a good idea about something. So you may already have identified what the action actually is. So for me, I found that sometimes, and for me, so I have a— actually, if I put an arrow in there digitally, so two dashes and I don't know what that's called in English, the one that makes it look like an arrow. That would for me mean that there's— and that would be a direct action for me that I know I need to do something. Could be waiting for, could be something for me to do. And I also use the colon if there's something that— so the other, the normal lines would be normal meeting notes, and then the colon would be something that I told myself regarding this. So just these little hacks have been helpful for me. Perhaps they could be helpful for some of you listening as well.

Morten: It's all about giving yourself, the future you, an easier.

Lars: Life. Exactly. So coming back to capturing while driving and running. So when I am out driving, for the most part, I will actually use my Siri shortcuts that I have set up. So I'm using my iPhone. I have the Shortcuts app. This enables you to build your own mini workflows, make these kinds of shortcuts. You can even enable them in Siri as well. You can speak directly to your phone and have it record what you're saying. So that's the workflow that I've built, or a shortcut that I've built, is that take the audio that I'm speaking. Once I hit the screen again, it will take that, turn that into an MP3 file, and then put that directly into my inbox. So it could be sent via email, or in my case, I'm using Todoist for my lists. Todoist offers a shortcut step, so I can just put that directly into my— my inbox there. So that seems to work really well. It seems to be very stable. I use it all the time, really, both when I'm walking around the house, but also when I'm driving. Anytime that it's something more complex where it might be a challenge for me to start to write things down, such as in the car, I would start to use that. But they don't— they're not yet supported on the watch. And usually the watch is what I only carry with me when I am out running. So I'm missing the ability to run shortcuts on my watch. I think it's coming just around the corner actually by the time we record this episode, but let's see. So for now at least, I am using an app called Braintoss, B-R-A-I-N-T-O-S-S, built by GTDeer in Amsterdam, I believe. And so when I'm out running, I'm just able to hit this small icon from Braintoss. It starts to record what I'm saying up to 30 seconds or until I hit the screen and it wraps that as an MP3 file. Sends it as an email to my email inbox. So my watch is not connected when I'm out running, but then when I get back home, it gets on the Wi-Fi, sends those off to my inbox so I can, again, stay present with my running. Good. And last but not least, I also just use Siri in general. And I think the voice assistants on Android are probably even better. For Siri, just the basic stuff to remind me to call my mom when I get in the car, remind to discuss the vacation plans with my wife when I get home. We also use it for the basic shopping list things. So, you know, daily grocery shopping, that would go on there. Add mango chutney to the shopping list. For the most part, the transcription works well, but at least in Danish, you'll sometimes find some fun stuff on that list. So it just makes it more fun.

Morten: Yeah, we have the same challenge here that it doesn't transcribe always very good, but it makes the life a little more funny. But you also then have to— what on earth did I try to capture here? Exactly. Yeah, and I use also Siri, not on my watch because I don't have an Apple Watch. I used to before, but I don't anymore. But I use it on my phone. I either press the side button or I go, hey, we're not supposed to say this out loud because we're going to trigger a lot of phones out there. So, but hey woman, remind me to call my dad when I leave here. Or you can also actually use it for remind me about, about this. If you, for instance, in Safari, you go remind me about this at 5 o'clock. She will remember what this is and she will pop up a message on your screen at 5 o'clock. The idea here for most of the things that you want to use these tools for, if you want to remind yourself, you want to have a pop-up on your screen, if you use it as this, is remember to turn off all the other notifications you don't need so it doesn't drown. Because if you don't trust the way you capture for reminding you stuff, if it drowns in the sea of notifications, you don't trust your system. Therefore, you must calm the sea of notifications so that you only get the ones you need. That's my hot tip. But I also use Say&Go, which is an alternative to BrainTask. I also have BrainTask, but I don't know why I like Say&Go better. Say&Go is without any spaces. It's say like in English, say, and ampersand. This sign and go. If you make any spaces or don't write it exactly like this, maybe you want to make a note of this in the show notes for— because it's going to be a link directly maybe for Braintoss and say and go. Maybe you will do that. The reason for this is because it's— I've done this several times trying to tip people about this and they can't find it if they don't write it say and go without spaces. So, and it works the same way as BrainTask except that I have, when I'm in the car, of course I have a hands-free. So when I do this, I can do this without, you know, doing a lot of mojo mumbo-jumbo. I will just swipe up and tap the icon once and that's it. And I say my message, I give myself 7 seconds. That's, I found this enough for me to give get the thought out of my head, and it will capture this as an audio file and then attach it to an email and send it to my inbox. And then it closes the program after, so I don't have to do that. I can then just lock the phone again, and it's very fast and very convenient. And I know the Braintoss does some transcribing as well. I don't know how well that works in Danish, it doesn't work very well.

Lars: Yeah, the right way to describe it. And it also does it for images. I think it does better there. But no, the transcription again, or the AI behind it, is not that reliable. You still need to listen to the audio again to really understand what was said.

Morten: Yeah, which kind of defeats the purpose of having it at all when you have to try. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. And you have to re— if you read and you don't understand, then that's a waste of time. If you could use your mental energy to listen instead. So that's why I don't use the transcription there. So the idea of capturing is, of course, get things out of your head while the idea shows up in your head. Oh, I have something wrong with my car. There's a strange noise in the boot area and I need to do something about it. Write it down or get it out of your head as quickly as possible. Because it will bog down your mental capacity. And you're able, for instance, when you're running, some people say that running clears your mind. And I think maybe you will have an even clearer mind when you run if you don't have anything you need to remember. I don't know. What do you think, Lars? You are a runner. Yeah.

Lars: Serious one even. So I know that, you know, it really is nice to clear your mind in that way. But I know also from past experience that you can sometimes get into a loop where you keep thinking about the same things all the time. And that can really defeat the purpose of the running if your intention was to run and clear your mind. So again, to have that practice to get that out of your head, that really helps for me and a lot.

Morten: Of people who obviously use these techniques. So let me ask you a question because you are, I would call you a semi-serious runner. Is that correct? Assumption. Yeah, because you run marathons, you run different, you know, what I would call hell races. I don't know why you do this, but because it's— but I admire you for this, Lars. But I don't know why. But when you are— what do you do when you run a marathon, for instance? Do you carry your Apple Watch for this or?

Lars: Yeah, so I would make sure to either have some, some, some paper or carry my, my watch. Or, you know, the run— the races that we, we run are normally ultra running, so that's even longer distances. And we're not, you know, we're not running to become first to, to cross the finish line at all. So, so we normally take it easy, and that means that we, we can, you know, grab the phone and take a picture if you have a beautiful sunrise as we start the run or something. So we can capture in that way. But right now, just coming back to what you said before about the car making a funny noise, one of the reminders that's in my inbox right now is to put some oil on the stroller for the youngest one, because we were just out walking and it was such a nice evening, but then it kept going. So I really have to remember that one because I forgotten to capture that one when it first happened. So now I want to be sure that we don't have to listen to that one when we try to have a nice relaxing walk, maybe tonight.

Morten: Yeah, good, good. Capture it straight away. This is good. So, and I just realized that we only capture, you know, we covered, um, captural that are digital. And it's just, I talked to someone before, I don't remember actually who, but a long time ago, but 6 months ago or something, who said when he was running, he uses a small mobile phone arm case, the one you strap to your arm, with a notepad and pen because these are waterproof so that when you run, your sweat don't destroy the pad and the pen. And if it's raining, it doesn't matter, you can run anyway. That's also like low level. You stop for— you, you must stop for a little, but you must also, when you run, you must stop until you get your bath to capture, I guess. True, true. Yeah, so, so maybe, maybe a paper and pen there would be even better.

Lars: I don't know.

Morten: Yeah, could be.

Lars: Yeah.

Morten: Okay, um, I think we near the end of our discussion here. Do you have anything to add, Alois?

Lars: Just, uh, the reminder to avoid having too many places to capture. So now we've mentioned the number of different tools. And I think the more you progress with GTD, the more you become, you know, make these things habits, then certainly you can probably manage a bit more, but really try to keep it as simple as possible. And that's also why these tools such as Braintoss, which I think I mentioned in a previous episode as well, that when you use these, often they redirect to your inbox. So it's still that same email inbox that you have to get to the bottom of and not adding multiple inboxes because that can really, really complicate your system.

Morten: Yeah, as few as you can get away with and as many as you need. Exactly. Yeah. So, so how do we wrap this up for today?

Lars: Well, as usual, we always redirect people to— if you want to learn more about this in the Nordics, then that's gcdnordic.com. You will find links to all of the various country websites in the Nordics. Links to our Facebook groups, various meetups, find us on LinkedIn, find the newsletter, find our seminars, all that good stuff, gtddenordic.com. And as mentioned in the beginning, we really hope that you get value from these episodes, and please do share them with a colleague if, if that's the case.

Morten: And, and please, please, if you have a question, send it to us.

Lars: What was the email address again? podcast@gtdenordic.dk, and I'll put that in the as well.

Morten: Good, good, thank you. And this is— I hope as well as Lars that it's been valuable for you. Any questions, any comments, please send them to us. We love hearing from you. And as a final note, if you are in iTunes, give us a rating if you like this. Give us your honest opinion. We would love to hear from you. Okay, thank you guys for hanging out with us. Until next time, have a great and productive two weeks.

Lars: Thanks everyone, bye-bye. Bye-bye.