Capture Perfect

All dedicated GTD-apps I’ve tried (most notably Things and Omnifocus) share the same flaw: they treat the inbox as just another list.

The capture process is the part of GTD I first fell in love with. The habit of collecting all loose threads in one safe place is very liberating. In real life an inbox can contain almost anything–notes, photos, books, calling cards, magazines and more. The inbox is a place where you needn’t worry about structure. You put your stuff in there as they come to you. Structure comes into play once you process your inbox, decide what needs to be acted upon, and place your decided actions on lists.

In the digital world the freedom of the all-receiving inbox seems to be lost. In Omnifocus and Things inbox items must be of the same structure as items on action lists. There is a title, a note and possibly a start date and due date. Omnifocus items may contain pictures, PDFs and such, but only as attachments.

Why is this? Why impose this kind of structure in the collection part of the GTD-process?

I want a free-form digital inbox, where I can put all kinds of digital documents. Today, I have to look outside dedicated GTD-apps to find this.

I suppose Evernote is a pretty close approximation of what I want. It accepts most types of documents, is pretty free-form and is universally accessible. Personally I can’t stand the bloated behemoth that is Evernote, though.

Today I use Apple Mail as a general-purpose inbox. Yes, I know. Mail. But in my defense I must say it works pretty well. All mail sent to a particular address is filtered to a specific IMAP folder directly on the mail server. This way I won’t see them in the mail inbox on my iPhone.

Mail accepts just about every known digital document known to man as an attachment. All my digital information sources–e-mail, Twitter, Reeder and Instapaper–can send links and text as e-mail. Things and Omnifocus is well intergrated with Apple Mail, which makes it easy to transform inbox items to actions on appropriate lists.

These days most of my information-collecting is done on my iPhone. I use Captio as a super-swift way of putting notes and photos in my inbox. I can’t recommend this little gem of an iPhone app enough.