An empty task inbox

This is the part people get wrong and then give up on. Emptying the inbox does not mean completing what is in it; it means deciding what each item is. Allen’s rule: if it takes two minutes or less, do it now — otherwise it becomes a next action, a project, a someday item, a reference note, or rubbish.

An inbox with forty undecided things in it is not a backlog of work. It is a backlog of decisions, which is heavier.

So that capture can be thoughtless. If writing something down requires choosing a project and a date, capture is slow, and slow capture means you stop capturing — which is the failure that actually kills a system. An inbox is the place where an item is allowed to be undecided for a while.

In TaskPocket it is one of three locations a task can be in, alongside a project and Someday. Note one behaviour worth knowing: giving an inbox task a date moves it to Someday automatically. See the dates FAQ.

Daily if you capture a lot, weekly at minimum — step 2 of the weekly review is getting it to zero. The number itself does not matter; what matters is that nothing sits undecided long enough for you to start avoiding the list.