Last updated Feb 22, 2024
Do you ever feel like you’re busy all the time, but never being productive? You’re dealing with information, communicating, and doing things, but it feels like nothing truly gets done. Even when you’ve put in a full day’s work, you feel like you can’t quite relax. There’s always something spinning in your brain. You need to capture information in a safe system.
Why You Feel Overwhelmed
In the productivity classic Getting Things Done, David Allen explains why you have that feeling:
“You can fool everyone else, but you can’t fool your own mind. It knows whether or not you’ve come to the conclusions you need to, and whether you’ve put the resulting outcomes and action reminders in a place that can be trusted… your mind can’t let go until and unless you park a reminder in a place it knows you will, without fail, look.”
You have responsibilities, projects, and goals. Certainly, you don’t want to miss opportunities or perform badly. You don’t want to let others, or yourself, down. But you can’t be ‘on’ all the time without severe consequences. The key to balance and relaxation is a good system for managing the information connected to all the things you need and want to do.
Capture All the Information
Information comes in lots of forms: documents, images, files, requests, due dates, emails, messages, conversations, and so on. To stay in control of your work and have balance in your life, you need a trusted place to capture that information so you can review and remind yourself of it when needed.
“In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do…”
Teamup is a great solution. It’s simple, fast, and user-friendly. You can easily capture and store all the bits of information, tag and track context, sort the data, see it in different views, share information securely, work on mobile or desktop, and stay synced across all your devices.
Whether you use Teamup as your info-capture system or not, be sure you keep these points in mind:
- Capture all the information in a system, not in your brain.
- Set up a universal in-tray to collect info from all the inputs.
- Make a habit of tagging the context for every piece of information you capture so you can find it easily.
- Customize your system so you capture the details that matter to you.
Teamup makes it easy and fun: try out the custom fields, mobile apps, reminders, emoji support, and calendar views. Try a live demo to see all the features in action.