How to capture coaching tasks before you forget them

This article covers the capture stage of our productivity workflow. Capture is the first and most important part of the system, and the other stages depend on it.

The three processes: capture, review, do

Every reliable productivity system, including David Allen's Getting Things Done, comes back to three processes:

1. Capture: get things out of your head and into a trusted system.
2. Review: regularly process and organise what you captured.
3. Do: execute the things that matter.

Most people skip straight to doing, then wonder why they feel scattered. The foundation is missing. This article builds it.

Use a reliable place to capture tasks

Every task, obligation or half-formed plan you hold in your head is an open loop. Open loops are expensive. They create a background hum of low-level stress that makes it hard to be present in what you are doing now.

The fix is to get things out of your head and into a system you trust, completely and immediately.

Capture tools that work

1. A task app with a fast keyboard shortcut

Speed matters. The longer capture takes, the more it disrupts what you were doing.

We use TickTick with a keyboard shortcut: open it, type the task, assign a list and time, done. Natural language input means you can type something like 'buy lemons tomorrow 9am shopping list' and it files the task correctly.

Any task app with a reliable shortcut works. The friction has to be low enough that you use it every time.

2. A working memory file

This idea comes from Cal Newport. It solves a specific problem: what do you do when you are deep in focused work and something comes up that is not a concrete, schedulable task?

Perhaps it is an idea to revisit or something to think through later. Opening your task app and turning it into an action would break your flow, but ignoring it means you spend the rest of the session half-thinking about it.

Keep a plain text file called workingmemory.txt. Open it, type the thought, close it and return to the work. You have lost neither the idea nor your focus.

3. A read-later app for links

When someone sends you an article, a video or a link worth reading later, do not leave it in a chat window or an open browser tab you will forget. Use a read-later app that strips articles to clean text, ideally with text-to-speech so you can listen while walking. A tab manager such as Toby lets you organise links into categories, for example a reading list, a watching list or a project.

4. A reference system for documents

Insurance documents, tax information and service records do not belong in your inbox. Your inbox is a processing space, not a filing cabinet. Forward anything you will need later to a dedicated reference system. Evernote works well and integrates with most email clients. If you need to find something months from now, a quick search should surface it.

5. Capture on the go

• Voice notes or Siri. A 'remind me to' request can go straight into TickTick with the right integration.
• A physical notebook, which is often faster than any app for quick capture.
• TickTick mobile for anything that needs to go into your task system directly.

The notification problem

Everything is urgent to the person sending it. That urgency is theirs, not yours. Every notification is someone else's priority arriving unannounced. If you give the world unlimited access to your focus, you spend your days reacting to other people's agendas.

Turn off all notifications, on every app. Leave phone calls on if you need to. Check email, messages and social media on your schedule.

Consider removing email from your phone entirely. If you cannot process an email properly in the moment, opening it adds to your mental load without letting you act. Set specific windows to process email and deal with it properly then.

Process each item once

When you sit down to process your inboxes, every item gets one of four outcomes:

• Act on it now if it takes under two minutes.
• Schedule it by adding it to your task system with a time.
• Delegate it to someone else.
• Delete it or archive it.

There is no fifth option. Nothing sits in the inbox waiting. Clear it regularly, at least every couple of days.

Why the system has to be complete

Capture systems only work if you trust them completely. Choose a consistent capture method for each source of incoming work, then review the combined list. Capture needs regular review to go with it, so that every recorded task gets a decision and a next action.

The goal is not productivity for its own sake. It is the mental space to do your best work without everything else bleeding in around the edges.

What comes next

Capture is the first piece. The review stage covers how to work through what you have captured, how TickTick is used in more depth and how to contain shallow work such as email and admin so it does not eat your most important hours. The video below walks through the capture stage.

Related guide: How to plan a realistic working day as an online coach.