Basically a container is anything you collect information with. Here’s the basic natural ones: email inbox, voicemail, mailbox, etc. Then I’ve got all kinds of other ones: scraps of paper, physical inbox, planner, calendar, my hand, on my blog, etc. Having too many containers is a bad thing. The thing is you need as few containers as possible and you need to fully trust in your containers. You need to trust in your system so that you can get things out of your head and into your containers and trust they’ll be taken care of so you don’t have to think about them anymore. You need fewer containers so that you don’t forget things or lose them (like I do with my scraps of paper).
The other thing is you have to go through your containers daily, otherwise it doesn’t work. You can’t let your stuff pile up in your inbox. This is going to be tougher and I’m hoping to learn better how to do this as I read. I’ll post more when I figure it out.
So here’s what my containers will be at home (and similar at work):
- physical inbox
- voicemail
- planner
You should remove the voicemail one. whenever you get a voicemail, immediately write it in your planner.
Agreed, voicemails won’t stay there for long. But it’s still a container because things collect there.