Capture inbox
- Industry term
A capture inbox is one agreed place where you drop things the moment they come up, such as notes, receipts, links, and ideas, before deciding where each one belongs.
Dropping an item in a known place takes seconds, so it happens even in a busy moment, and it catches details that fade fast, like where the item came from and why you kept it. With everything waiting in one spot, sorting becomes a single sitting on your calendar.
Where you’ll meet it
It's tax season, and your receipts are spread across your email, photos on your phone, and a kitchen drawer. You remember buying a desk chair for your home office in the spring, and you can't find that receipt anywhere.
What to do
Pick one place every receipt goes on the day you get it, such as an email address you forward them to, with photos of paper ones sent there too. Once a month, have your assistant file each by category and list any it couldn't place for you to sort.
Easy to mix up
| Capture inbox | Filing system |
|---|---|
| Until the next time you empty it | For as long as you keep the item |
Check yourself
Your assistant builds this week's to-do list straight from your capture inbox, and the list includes “learn Italian,” an idea you jotted down on a whim. What went wrong?
Go deeperThe habit predates AI, and an assistant emptying it adds new risks
The habit is central to David Allen's 2001 book Getting Things Done, where collecting everything into a few trusted inboxes is the first step. Note-taking apps and personal knowledge systems use the same idea, and AI adds an assistant that can do the emptying on a schedule.
An automated sorter that stops partway and reruns can file an item twice, so it should label each item as it files it and skip labeled ones. Moving each item to an archive as it leaves the inbox, with a log of where it went, makes a wrong category a quick fix, with nothing lost.
One inbox for everything means the assistant reads everything. Medical letters or legal papers may belong in a separate channel that the assistant has no access to.