How many inboxes do I have?

Too many.

The process of collection in Getting Things Done is filling your personal in-box with every task you might want to do (be it buying a nail, or selling a house). In an ideal world, we would have one in-box, put everything we wanted to do in one place, and then (when it came to processing) work through things one step at a time.

The world (as you may have noticed) is far from ideal.

The perfect world's in-box would be able to accept physical things: not just the excessive bills that have been stuffed wantonly through my letterbox by greedy utilities companies, but also the ball left untidily on the lawn and the new set of body building weights which I havn't figured out where to store yet. It would also be with me at all times, so I could add a new idea the moment it popped into my little mind.

I don't really fancy dragging my new set of weights around with me.

The solution then, is to have multiple in-boxes. The ones which fit into my life are:

An in-box for papers which sits near the front door, and accepts all those bills.
A notepad which I write things down in, and carry around with me
A section of my desk at work, which I pile all sorts of things into, promising I'll do something with them one day. It currently contains a box of business cards showing my companies old name and a telephone extension that won't reach me since our internal exchange changed. A plastic bottle I use for water (or would do - it hasn't been filled up since before Christmas), and an ethernet card which doesn't work (along with a index card attached to it which says "this ethernet card doesn't work).

But this too is insufficient. The weights wouldn't fit into my paper in-box. They would probably make it crack under their weight. It's almost ready to crack under the weight of the bills (I wonder if red ink is lighter...)

And other people keep giving me new in-boxes. My answering machine is an in-box. So is my email in-box (in fact, there is a clue in its name). As a software engineer, I have to handle fixing bugs and adding feature requests. We manage this with a piece of software. This software is an in-box (and also sends emails to my email in-box). At home, all the bookcases containing books I haven't read are, in their own way in-boxes. When I arrive home in the evening, my doormat is an in-box (for the bills, which get opened and placed in a new in-box), for the free paper, which gets placed in black recycling out-box, and for the pizza delivery menus, which tempt me away from my diet.

In truth, everything that is disorganised in your life is an in-box. Everything that is untidy is an in-box.

GTD recommends making a note of all things too big to fit into your in-box and then processing them one at a time. But in order to decide what gets put into your paper in-box, you are already processing. Maybe making a decision about where to put the weights goes into my notepad in-box, but deciding whether to throw away that empty crisp packet on my lawn is a processing action: do I really need to log it in my in-box, or would it be better just to say "my lawn is untidy, it has become an in-box" and add the task of processing new next in-box to the never-ending list of things to do.

I think the latter is the more reasonable system.

Sure, I should aim to keep things down to 3 in-boxes, but I should use my eyes to notice when other in-boxes exist, and need managing!