What is a "capture habit" and what are all these initialisms?
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a productivity methodology that was published in 2001 and was pretty popular among techies.
Some key concepts it brings to bear:
- Closing open loops: any time you have a mental todo or note, it's taking up scarce mental resources (c.f. the Zeigarnik effect); externalizing it lessens the load and relieves stress
- The importance of weekly review: without it, your task list will devolve, and the system will break down
- The importance of a trusted system: if you have to keep things in mind after writing them down, it's not very good at removing the stress of an open loop, and if you lose things you've written down, it's not really functioning as an effective task list
- A Tickler file: for things that you want out of your mind until you need to think about them again, you can schedule them for review at a future date; this is distinct in purpose from deadlines (you need to think about those well in advance) and appointments (they are action you do at a time, not information you are presented with at a time, and they're typically more rigidly scheduled), so they don't belong on your calendar
This is a good overview, including both an early official diagram of the process and an improved rendering.
GTD is notoriously hard to stick with, so Zen To Done (ZTD) takes the core of it and breaks it down in a way that emphasizes forming the key habits.
One mistake I think ZTD makes is focusing too much on breaking down into components; a reliable capture habit that goes straight into the shredder does more harm than good; if I were to posit a method for getting GTD to stick, I'd start with a focus on mutual reinforcement of the components.
It turns out that a lot of the GTD components for productivity apply to creating a personal knowledge base (i.e. taking (smart) notes); curated meme collections and friends' pet peeves are special cases of this.
I am particularly bad at taking notes; I never picked up the skill because I was able to learn well enough from listening in class, and when I couldn't, there was a textbook to reference.
Now, it often feels like there's no point in writing something down for later, but this is not the case because the environment is different: for example, there is no reference (at least not one that's effectively indexed), and I have irrecoverably lost things that I wanted to remember.
So I'm trying to build a habit wherein I save things for later, but the difficulty is that taking the note is aversive in the moment, and the positive value that comes from it is far enough in the future that the habit tends to extinguish before it sets in.