Having practiced GTD for +5 years I’ve come to love the concept of as few inboxes (places to look) as possible. This principle collides with the jdex, where you have multiple inbox locations in your system. As I’m fairly new in the JD world, I want to experience the standard setup and live in it for a while, before changing anything. That being said, I wanted a quick overview of all my inbox locations in my JD system, so I created this dataview table in Obsidian. The note is in my 10.01 folder, and is called Master Inbox. Feel free to use it and play with to fit your needs. The table will render three coloumns: File name (link), Location, and Area. Location is the JD number (AC.ID) and name of the folder, and Area is the number and name of the top level folder. It will only look in folders where the string “Inbox” is present. Note that this “WHERE” clause is case sensitive, so remember to be consistent with your naming. I don’t know anything about regex, but a little fiddling with ChatGPT made it work:
table regexreplace(file.folder, ".*/", "") as "Location", regexreplace(file.folder, "/.*", "") as "Area"
from ""
where contains(file.path, "Inbox")
sort file.folder asc
I’m also a fan of GTD and also have an issue with having a separate inbox for each category in JD. It’s bad enough that the main system inbox is hidden under 00-09/01/01.01 Inbox (3 levels down the hierarchy) but having an inbox in every category doesn’t work well for me. It’s OK to have those AC.01 ID reserved for inboxes (i.e. something to be sorted out) but these locations will likely become a graveyard of junk in my system.
I wanted to share my approach to Inboxes. My default system Inbox is my root directory. When I scan or download something or need to save a file in my system, I first dump it into the root directory. There these items become an eye sore begging to put them away. As soon as I can, I move them into the Area directories. There they beg to be moved down to a category, and there they beg to be moved further down to an AC.ID folder or even further.
I do the same with physical papers - I dump them onto my desk where they turn into clutter, and I’m compelled to sort them out rather sooner than later. “Neat” inboxes turn into bins of unwanted trash for me.
It’s a natural path from chaos to order. The higher item is located in my file hierarchy, the less organized it is. Organizing files means moving them down the hierarchy until they reach the place where they belong.
Your query will also match files that have “Inbox” in their file name, which is inconvenient when using folder notes or documenting your inbox workflow. Easily solved by adding and !contains(file.name, "Inbox") to the WHERE clause.
