Quick capture: how to get things out of your head and get a decent night's sleep
Ralph Varcoe
4 min read
Quick capture is the habit of getting any thought, task or idea out of your head and into a trusted inbox the moment it occurs to you, and then dealing with the whole inbox later in one go. It's the first step of David Allen's Getting Things Done, published in 2001, and it's one of the simplest ways there is to feel less cluttered. In PiViva it takes about four seconds: you tap the button, type one line and save.
Why does your brain remind you of things at two in the morning?
You'll probably recognise this one. You've had a perfectly reasonable day, you've finally switched the light off, and just as you're drifting off your brain pipes up with "you need to email the school", followed swiftly by "did you ever pay the car insurance?" and, for good measure, a half-formed idea for next week's presentation.
Your brain is genuinely trying to help, bless it, but its timing is dreadful. And the thing about all those little open loops is that they don't only bother you at night. Each one you're carrying sits somewhere in the back of your mind all day, taking a little slice of your attention whether you're working on it or not, which goes a long way to explaining why you can feel busy and frazzled without being able to say exactly what you've been busy with.
The good news is that this is one of the easiest problems to fix, and it doesn't take any willpower at all.
What is Getting Things Done, and where did it come from?
David Allen published Getting Things Done in 2001, and its central observation is one most of us can relate to straight away. The mind is very poor at storing things, and it keeps reminding you about them at the least useful moments. As Allen puts it, your mind is for having ideas, and holding on to them is a different job altogether.
His answer is capture. You get everything out of your head and into something you trust, whether it's a task, a worry, a "must remember to" or a flash of inspiration, and then, at a time that suits you, you sit down and decide what each item actually needs. Separating those two jobs is the heart of the whole approach, and once your brain learns that nothing is going to be lost, it tends to calm down and stop nagging.
How does Quick Capture work in PiViva?
Wherever you are in the app, you tap the capture button, type one line and save it, which takes about four seconds. There's no form to fill in and nothing to decide, so there's nothing to stop you doing it the moment a thought arrives.
Later, when you have a few minutes, you open the inbox and work through everything you've captured, oldest first. For each item you can choose Rate and Prioritise, which turns it into a proper action, or Discard, which lets it go. Keeping the capturing and the deciding apart is what makes the habit stick, since the moment there's a form in the way most of us simply stop bothering.
Two things help enormously. The first is to capture everything, including the things that may turn out not to matter, as the moment you start filtering at the point of capture you'll find yourself filtering out important things too. The second is to empty the inbox regularly, as a capture list you never look at quickly becomes one more thing you feel guilty about ignoring.
What if your inbox gets overwhelming?
It happens to everyone at some point, usually after a hectic week when you've been capturing faithfully and never quite found the time to process anything. The answer is to take it in small batches, and ten minutes a day is usually plenty to keep on top of it.
Once an item becomes an action, it's rated and placed in the Eisenhower Matrix and the Action Priority Matrix, so you can see straight away where it sits against everything else you're doing and whether it really deserves your attention this week.
Quick Capture is also a wonderful companion to the Pomodoro Timer. When a stray thought turns up halfway through a focused session, as it almost certainly will, you can capture it in a few seconds and get straight back to what you were doing, safe in the knowledge that it'll still be there when you're ready. It's a small habit, but it can make a real difference to how calm and clear your days feel, and to how well you sleep at night.
Questions people ask
What is the capture step in GTD?
Capture is the habit of recording every task, idea or commitment in a trusted inbox as soon as it occurs to you, so that your mind doesn't have to keep holding on to it. It's the first step in David Allen's Getting Things Done method.
Who created Getting Things Done?
David Allen created Getting Things Done and set it out in his 2001 book of the same name.
How often should I process my capture inbox?
Daily, or every few days, works well for most people. Ten minutes at a time is usually enough, and an inbox you never empty soon stops doing its job.
Should I capture small things too?
Yes, capture everything, however small, and decide what matters later when you process the inbox. Filtering as you capture tends to mean important things get filtered out as well.