Perhaps you know the familiar phrase from the field of computer science, “Garbage In, Garbage Out“? Well, the same goes for your GTD system. Here’s a big surprise: if you feed your GTD system incomplete or incorrect input in the Collection phase, you will never get reliable or useful output in the Doing phase (next actions).

Ubiquitous capture is a well-known principle in the collection phase of the GTD workflow. If done well, it helps you to generate useful, complete and correct input for your GTD system. To help you optimize your ubiquitous capturing, I have compiled a list of 10 useful tips from my own experience.

Before I give you my list of 10 tips, I would like to share the evolution of my ubiquitous capture tool (UCT) with you. I probably forgot some of the things I used as UCT, but here are a few. At one point I bought a stack of expensive Moleskines and used several of them as my UCT. This violates several of the rules described below: it’s expensive and it doesn’t invite you to create quick and dirty notes. Then I started to collect digital notes on my laptop (e.g. plain text files). Violations: not really portable, not simple and not quick. I used the same principle with my Windows Mobile PDA. Though portable, it’s not quick enough and certainly expensive. I finally settled on a small set of UCTs: scraps of paper (could be anything ripped to small pieces) and a simple pen; and sometimes voice notes with my mobile phone. It’s simple, cheap, quick, fun and they complement each other perfectly!

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Rest of the list for "10 Useful Tips for Optimizing Ubiquitous Capture" can be found here:

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