[PODCAST 295]: Let’s Talk About Landing Spots

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Landing Spots exist in all of our lives, and what we decide to do with them determines how our minds and spaces feel. When we let the physical items pile up, things feel cluttered. When the digital items start to increase, it can feel almost impossible to sort through everything to pull out the important things.

However, when your Landing Spots are checked regularly, each important item will be addressed and any related tasks can be extracted from the physical or digital item.

We’re going to discuss 3 Landing Spot areas today, but I want to emphasize that there is 1 important part of the Command Central that is NOT a Landing Spot.

Your Inbox is NOT a Landing Spot.

When items come into your life, your Landing Spots are the first line of defense. You’ll take a look at all the items (physical, digital, or mental) and do the following:

Take out any trash and get rid of it.
Pull out any items that need action taken ASAP. Either do those tasks now using the 2-minute rule or give yourself calendared time some time today to handle them. Remember, this is only for things that are truly urgent and need your attention right away.
Everything else should be non-urgent, but they all require some kind of action at some point. These are the items that belong in your Inbox.
Any item that made it this far will go into your Inbox to be processed during the Weekly Review.
During the Weekly Review, we’ll use the 8 STEP Processing Questions (a podcast all about those questions is linked at the end of this article) to help us decide what to do with all of the items.

So now that we know how to handle items that come into our Landing Spots and that our Inbox is not part of this first line of defense, what things DO count as Landing Spots?

(1) Physical Landing Spots

Each person’s life will look a little bit different, but here are some general ideas:

Corner of a counter in the kitchen
A basket on your desk where coworkers set things
Your car
Your purse, briefcase, backpack, or diaper bag
Entryway where the mail is set down
A file tray at the community organization you volunteer at

Where do physical items come into your life? Where do people place items that need your attention?

(2) Digital Landing Spots

Personal and work email inboxes
Text messages
Social media message inboxes
Slack or another app for work-related messages

(3) Your Capture Tool

This can be a paper or digital list that you keep with you throughout the day.

As ideas, thoughts, goals, future projects, pop-up tasks, etc., come into your mind during the day, write them down on this Capture Tool.

This is your mental Landing Spot. Whenever you have a thought that would otherwise get lost or keep you up at night, write it down here on the Capture Tool.

Now, what if we have way too many Landing Spots?

This is where you get to consolidate them!

In your home, you may need to tell your family members, “We aren’t setting items in 8 different places around the house any more. From now on, please set items in _____ place and I will look at them each day.”

The same goes for physical items given to you at work, a place where you volunteer, church, etc.

When it comes to the digital side of things, you might decide to consolidate email inboxes and have all your email accounts forwarded to one place, where possible. You might consider deleting some social media or messaging apps that are not being used regularly or that cause too much distraction or frustration.

This is totally up to you, and there’s no one right way to go about consolidating the places. Honestly, you could have 20 overall Landing Spots, and as long as you feel good about them and you are checking them every day, that’s all that matters!

However, if you feel like physical and digital clutter are building up and things are slipping through the cracks, you might need to streamline things.

I typically like to check in on my Landing Spots once a day. Here’s my overall process:

(1) My Physical Landing Spots

I check the following locations once a day and process all of the items that come from these areas:

My desk in the living room
Our entryway where we set our mail/items that come in from the car
The car
My diaper bag (it’s basically my purse–one place to hold everything)

At the end of the day, we do an apartment reset. This gives us a chance to check each Landing Spot and make sure that we don’t have any random papers/items floating around the house.

(2) My Digital Landing Spots

I have a solid routine for checking my personal and email inboxes at least once a day. I delete anything that is trash, I handle urgent things right away, and I put the rest of my emails into a folder to handle during my Weekly Review.

The same process goes for my text messages. I have a routine to check my messages 2-3 times a day and try my best to get back to everyone who messages me within 24 hours.

I have consolidated my messaging apps so I only have 3 additional places to look for my group chats with friends and family members.

If you’re thinking, “I don’t really have a good routine for checking emails, texts, or other digital messages,” I would invite you to add this as a future project on your Next in Line or Someday Projects List. It is a project to establish a new routine, and setting up a new routine that will support you long term is definitely worth the investment of time and energy!

(3) My Capture Tool

My Capture Tool is actually my email inbox because I have my email inbox to zero. Whenever I have an idea that comes into my head, I’ll simply send myself an email and then I’ll process these ideas along with my regular emails at the end of the day. Here are a couple things I emailed myself recently:

Invite new friends to dinner
Record items on our budget spreadsheet
Send a Facebook message to a high school friend
Add cookbook project to my Next in Line Projects List
Download free book a friend recommended

Each of these items was extracted from my email inbox and added to the appropriate place in my Command Central. Nothing is in my head any more and I can trust that they are all safe!

What about all the backlog in my physical and digital spaces?

Please resist the urge to handle every single email, text message, physical space, etc., right now. Dealing with backlog is a whole separate project (or many smaller projects once things have been broken down).

I recommend looking at what just came in today, yesterday, and maybe the past 2 weeks. Start pulling out anything urgent or time sensitive, but realize that most of the “stuff” that makes up the backlog has actually been sitting here for weeks, months, or even years. It doesn’t need your attention right this minute.

Focus on creating solid routines that will support you TODAY to process all the new things that are incoming. Once you have a good routine to handle everything new in your life, go back and start chipping away at the backlog. These can be added to your Next in Line Projects List, and they’ll be safe and ready for you when the time is right.

Are there any Landing Spot questions that you have for us? Feel free to leave them here in the comments section!