My Stuff! Folder is a menace (A post rich in GTD lingo)

I've got a folder on my Powerbook's Desktop called "Stuff!" that I use to clear items off of my desktop, and I also drag URLs, pictures and videos that interest me into it so that I can inspect them later when I've got more concentration time.

It's a roundabout version of the GTD In-basket. Rather than going through the traditional GTD process though, the Stuff that is cluttering my desktop will be funneled into sub-folders within the "Stuff!" directory.

Click the above for a full-sized version.

So the process is;

Drag something into "Stuff!".

At some point, open "Stuff!" and organize files based on what they are.

At some other point, go through each folder and apply a GTD process to each.

So already, there's a problem. Technically everything that goes into "Stuff!" is a Someday/Maybe item, if I process each item the same way. The reason this is actually working for me, though, is that if I process each item by the type of file it is, I can concentrate more fully on figuring out what to do with it. Since I'm dealing with items of the same type, I'll be using the same applications to process them, or I'll at least have a block of time dedicated to that activity (for example, video watching, or reading PDFs I've picked up).

At least that's the theory, and that's why I think it's been working for me thus far.

If it's something that's actionable, as you can see, it will get it's own @Project or @Something folder, and then I add an item to my OmniOutliner list with the same name. Those become my support files for that project.

So how's this really working so far? Not bad, but it could use improvement. It's too complex, and it lends itself to unintentional archival of data.

I have 293 URLs in one folder, and some of them are already dead! If I opened them 10 at a time in Firefox tabs, I'd have to open up 29+ Firefox windows to deal with them all.

280MB of images I've plucked off the web, or that I've taken and I don't know what to do with yet.

Some of the folders are more organized though. The video folders I tend to clear out regularly (since I like watching videos) for example.

Some of this stuff I'm never going to get to, so it is becoming clutter that I have to think about, and that's the part that's a larger problem. All that being said, it's more organized than I was in the past, so it's a step up.

To be continued as I re-org my systems this month. I'll update what changes I have made and how they're working.

Technorati Tags: apple, gtd, osx