The major piece of his methods is the Inbox. This is the place where all the Things that come at you are gathered so they can Processed properly. He also advocates for a few other bins, for such things as reading materials.
If you're like we are you wish everything you needed to read was digital, but that won't be so all the time. For the things that are paper based you need a system for dealing with all of it.
The Getting Things Done Team released an article for just that, Dealing With Too Much Reading. Here are their suggestions:
1. Put all of your critical reading material, i.e. boss memos, important meeting articles, etc. into a Next-Actions list. That means whenever you have 5 or 10 minutes free, these are the Next-Actions to complete.
2. All of the Of-Interest reading goes into the bin underneath your Inbox. These are things you would like to read but are not a priority. Take these with you on a plane trip, to a staff meeting you know you'll be early for, or to long meeting in bathroom each morning (ok I added that and that the GTD Team)??
3. Recreational reading tends to stay by the bed for those last few minutes of the day.
Overall, having a plan for your reading helps a great deal! Imagine that 3 or 4 times throughout the day when you think to yourself, 'what do I need to do right now?' Imagine if you had a plan instead of just getting lost on the internet or in gossip around the water cooler. Take those 5 minutes and multiply them by 3 and that's fifteen minutes of learning, enriching, or adding to your knowledge.
And don't forget to purge every now and again. If any of your Inboxes or bins get stuffed it's time process and get rid of what you don't need! After all, are you going to read that 2004 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology? Hope this helps! :)
