Summary

Many people struggle to apply the ideas in Getting Things Done, partly because those ideas seem like abstract “good things to do”, rather than as simple, practical solutions to immediate problems. Michael Lopp’s metaphor of “Blue Tape” offers another way to understand the power of Inbox Technique, which might help you (or someone who needs it!) persist in writing things down, even when it seems like they’re doing it, but nothing’s really happening.

Michael Lopp’s article, “The Blue Tape List” reached me today and I feel very glad that I took the time to read it. (I, too, have a backlog of thousands of articles waiting for me to read them.) While I read this delightful article, I noticed how much I liked the metaphor of Blue Tape and how it immediately sounded like something I teach regularly: Inbox Technique.

Putting blue tape on something that needs fixing sounds writing down a particular kind of item in my inbox: “Do something about X!” (or probably just “X!!!”)

From here, the corresponding parts of the Blue Tape metaphor and Inbox Technique/Getting Things Done start leaping to mind.

While working on a task, when a distraction comes up, write it down (add blue tape). Writing it down is not a commitment to doing the new thing, but rather a commitment to at least consider (address) the new thing. During this task, you will complete some of what you’ve added into the Inbox, and then when you can pause, you need to do something with what’s left in the Inbox. Do what?

What Happens Next?

When I teach Inbox Technique to folks, I primarily want them to experience the feeling of focus, but they tend to worry first about what to do with their Inboxes. Not every item that I write down becomes a new task, so it doesn’t always feel obvious what I ought to do with these inbox items, since I can’t always responsibly delete them.

Over the years, I’ve learned strategies such as converting these items into certain kinds of tasks that I put into my Trusted System. I find it helpful to phrase those items as tasks, which means that when I read them, I need to know how to do them. I phrase them as actions. Let me provide some examples:

• “Spend 10 minutes deciding whether to do X.”
• “Choose when to start working on Y.”
• “Decide once and for all whether to bother doing Z.”

Each of these provides an example of how to address the blue tape without assuming that we actually have to fix what the blue tape is alerting us to. As Michael points out:

You will notice my homework to new hires did not commit to fixing everything they saw, I committed to addressing it. This could mean fixing the issue, but it could also mean responding and clearly explaining my reasoning why I didn’t think fixing the issue was the right move.

Similarly, you are not obliged to do everything that you write in your Inbox. I consider this point critical, because if you thought of Inbox items as commitments to future projects, then you would gradually stop writing things down out of self defence. You would feel too afraid of overburdening yourself by overcommitting. And if you didn’t write these things down, then you’d never feel the freedom that comes with truly, deeply focusing on the current task. You would be missing the point of Inbox Technique in particular and of Getting Things Done more generally!

Whether you think of this as Inbox Technique or Blue Tape doesn’t much matter to me. I merely want you to feel this power of focusing on the current task because you trust yourself to handle future tasks as you need to and when you need to. That’s the power of Getting Things Done. And if you need to internalize this as a Blue Tape list to get those benefits, I’m happy. The only rule is that it has to work.

What’s New in Blue Tape?

More than providing another way to understand Inbox Technique and Getting Things Done, I really like Michael’s explanation of the special context in which these distractions are coming to mind: you’re in a new context and you are constantly seeing things that you will eventually start to ignore when they become more familiar. Michael’s invites you to make use of seeing these things while you so easily notice them.

It’s a surprise when a month passes, and you review your blue tape list and discover how items that seemed urgent at the time now seem entirely irrelevant. You are learning so much every single minute of a new gig; you are gathering so much context. You are continually updating your understanding, your context of the team, your role, and the company. Your understanding after three months of work isn’t remotely complete, but it is exponentially more complete than at the end of month two.

You still address every item on the blue tape list. Every item gets a response. If you’re planning on fixing the issue, explain how and when. If you’re not planning on fixing it, explain why. If you still aren’t sure about relative importance, think about how you might find it.

A large new context is uncomfortable. It’s an emotional time because that which was daily familiar is now wholly foreign. The high alert your brain defaults to is stressful, but it’s a lens that allows you to see defects the old guard can no longer see.

I see this as part of what makes Inbox Technique powerful: it allows you to notice things without feeling weighed down by them. When you feel weighed down by noticing things, then you train yourself to stop noticing, which destroys the value of noticing. I want the benefits of noticing, so I make it less expensive and less painful to notice things.

This last point corresponds directly to one of the points underlying Extreme Programming theory: feedback has value, but only when we get it in time to do something with it, otherwise it becomes merely painful in the form of regret. And we generally don’t handle regret well. Accordingly, we seek feedback not because “it’s good for us” or “someone wrote it in a book somewhere”, but rather because we have a strategy for doing something with it. I use Getting Things Done as one of my strategies for making use of the feedback that I give myself in the form of distractions surfacing while I’m trying to focus on a task. Without Inbox Technique, I would merely be distracted, feel uncomfortable, make more mistakes, and work more slowly.

As Michael points out in his article, when you know your brain will be sensitive to distractions, it helps to have a system for making use of those distractions. Blue Tape, Inbox, whatever you call it, I encourage you to build a system for letting those distractions be as they are, such as by making them constructive, rather than by trying to push them away. When you push them away, they tend to react by never, ever leaving you in peace.