Set up one capture spot
Pick one place. Write your rule. Name the moment you empty it. You get back a plan in your own words.
The short version
- A capture spot is one place everything you have to remember goes, unsorted, immediately. This tool sets up the three parts that make one hold: the spot itself, a rule for things that arrive inside somebody else's system, and a fixed daily moment to empty it.
- How many places you have matters more than which one you pick. The expensive part is deciding where a thing goes, so a single imperfect spot beats four half-systems. Almost any tool passes, stopping the search for a better one is the whole move.
- This is not a test and it returns nothing about you. It arranges what you type into a plan you can copy out and keep.
You already have somewhere to write things down, a notes app, a paper list, some starred emails, a reminder from March. None of them is wrong. The problem is that there are five, so every incoming thing carries a small decision about where it goes, and the search later has five places to check. This tool picks one and writes down how you will actually run it.
Before you begin
Have a rough idea of where things arrive for you (email, messages, people catching you in a corridor) and roughly when your day has a quiet minute. Six short questions. Nothing you type is saved.
Questions
Question 1 of 6
Your capture plan
Copy it somewhere it will survive
Select the text below and copy it into whatever you already use, including, if it fits, the capture spot itself. This page keeps nothing.
The line that decides whether this holds
Read back what you wrote for when and where you empty it. That is the line most plans leave out, and it is the one that turns a capture spot from a pile with better formatting into a working system. Emptying means every item gets moved somewhere real or deleted, and most get deleted. That is the point.
If it has not held after a few weeks, that is worth knowing on its own. It usually means the spot is too slow to open, or that requests are arriving faster than any single list could absorb, a problem with the channels, not with you.
Worth knowing. Deciding when and where you will do something (not merely that you will) is one of the better-supported findings in the goal-setting literature. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006). The emptying step is that finding applied to a list, which is why this tool asks for a fixed moment and a place rather than a good intention.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.