Discover Inbox
Inbox has five major sections to help you get things done: Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Work. Unlike many "personal productivity" applications, with Inbox you don't spend a lot of time configuring Inbox for your life and then maintaining it, instead just let Inbox manage things for you, use each section for what it's best at, letting Inbox coordinate between them.
Need to gather stuff so you don't worry you'r missing somthing you need? Add it to Collect. Worried things are piling up? Process your inbox. Planning a project and making lists? Organize your actions. Falling behind on keeping your to-do lists current? Review them. Trying to get things done? Work in context.
Collect |
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Think of each collection in Inbox as a "bucket," corralling inputs from a specific place on your Mac. Customize these and create new collections which best fit your activity. The most effective collections are smaller, showing the most recent stuff you may want to work with, making sorting through them a more manageable task. |
Process |
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Keeping your collections processed is a great way to reduce stress. You should process your Inbox at least once a day, or more often if you are very busy. Inbox comes preconfigured to process all the default collections, but you can customize these to help you focus on particular types of items at intervals that best suit your needs. |
Organize |
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The organize section is in many ways the heart of the Inbox experience. You can add items that you collect and process, keeping your projects fluid and up-to-date and of course create new actions, notes, and drag in files, directly. While organizing you can assign effort and contexts to your tasks to help you get things done more effectively. |
Review |
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When you loose focus on your work a great way to get back to where you belong is to do a review. Daily and weekly reviews are essential practices which will keep you calm, collected, and productive. Inbox includes several preset reviews based both upon time, and level of importance. Simply let Inbox guide you through what to review. |
Work |
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Inbox is all about getting this done — stress-free. Assigning contexts to your actions allows you to display your work lists based on where and when you are, to work most effectively. Tracking what needs to be done and what has been done can be tedious, Inbox displays in real time your active actions and contexts one at a time so you can stay focused. |
Inbox also has three supporting sections to help you while you're getting things done: Reference, Archive, and Trash. Have stuff you want to keep around? File it in Reference. Looking for something you completed before? Check the Archive. Got stuff to get rid of? Trash it.
Reference |
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Not all items are actions and not all contexts are active. For things you might want to keep around for another time, or simply as reference, Inbox has topics. Each is essentially an inactive "non-actionable" context for you to defer items and notes to. |
Archive |
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As you complete projects and actions this is where they go when they're done, archived in case it's helpful to refer to later. Organized by date of completion, it's easy to see what you've been getting done while using Inbox. |
Trash |
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As you work with Inbox you'll be collecting lots of stuff. You should feel empowered to throw away as much of the clutter as you can, as it comes in and as you are done with it. Don't let the milk float ride your mind. |