Covey's "7 Habits" taught me everything I needed to know. I use the app Things to throw new items into an Inbox. This takes half a second and doesn't distract

Covey's "7 Habits" taught me everything I needed to know. I use the app Things to throw new items into an Inbox. This takes half a second and doesn't distract me from whatever it is I'm working on at the time. Later, when I have a free moment, I use the classic time management grid to mentally map every item in the Inbox into one of four categories: 1. Urgent & Important 2. Not Urgent but Important 3. Urgent but Not Important 4. Not Urgent & Not Important (Visualized as a 2x2 matrix) This categorization step could be done once a day or once an hour depending on how much incoming work there is. Based on the outcome of that quick assessment, I move the item into one of the categories 'Things' provides out-of-the-box: Today, Someday, Any time. And I have tags for every project or area of responsibility I have. During this step I usually take a few minutes to fill in some details about the task that I don't want to forget. Sometimes I realize the task is an entire project in itself, so it gets a new tag or Project item in Things. Every day I start out by scanning my projects and moving items into the Today list. The day is done when I've checked them all off (yeah, right!) It's all derived, I believe, from the Getting Things Done methodology. [1] https://www2.usgs.gov/humancapital/documents/TimeManagementGrid.pdf https://www2.usgs.gov/humancapital/documents/TimeManagementG... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done