Using the Inbox and Archive
The Life Admin and Small Business Systems come pre-loaded with the standard zeros:1
.00 JDex.01 Inbox.02 Task & project management.03 Templates.04 Links.09 Archive
This is advanced Johnny.Decimal. If you saw the previous page and your eyes glazed over, you're safe to skip this. But we do recommend dipping your toe in and trying out .01 Inbox and .09 Archive.
.01 Inbox
You don't always have time to figure out where a thing should go. But hopefully you at least know which area or category it should fit in.
The inbox is a place to store your thing temporarily. If you go to save something on your Desktop, you should try to put it in an inbox instead.
It's called inbox because an inbox is something that you clear out occasionally. So, do that. Look through it when you have time later and put everything in proper homes.
Example
You book a ticket to an event and you're not sure where it should go. In the Life Admin System, you know it belongs in category:
15 Travel, events, & entertainment
So you stash it in 15.01 Inbox for category 15 for now.
Tip: Use it to move in to your system
When you start to organise your system, move all of your stuff into the relevant category inbox first.
This is a simple way to go from total chaos to pretty good. Then tackle each category inbox, moving every item to its proper home in an ID.
.09 Archive
Taking this one step further, the archive is for stuff that you'll never organise. But you don't want to delete it.
Don't worry about what's in here. If you see something and think, I want to keep this but I doubt I'll look at it again, put it in your archive.
Use with caution!
Think of this as one step away from the trash. And, seriously, throw things away sometimes. Just because you can keep everything doesn't mean you should.