I’m waiting for a DVD to arrive from an online purchase I made a week ago. I hope it gets here soon.

And I don’t know if I’ll have to contact them before receiving the package. But before reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, I never had a good, organized way of knowing what to do, or where to find the ‘electronic trail’ of receipts, if I had to contact the company.

Here’s what I do now, when I order anything online (or standard mail order from a catalogue).

I have a template Memo on my Palm Pilot that has the following “fields” to enter:


Company Name: _______
Company Cust Serv Phone: _______
Company Email Contact (usually the better
option since I dont like making calls from work:) _______
Reference Number: (you usually get an email receipt ________
with some kind of ref or order number)
Company Address: _______
Date Ordered: _______
Which of my credit cards I used: ______
Last Person I Spoke With on the Phone: _______

This defines a “Project” in the GTD world. I will keep this memo on the Palm Pilot in the “Pending Shipment” category, until I receive a working product in my hand. A project is in a way, an “anchor” that keeps all of the supporting information or “Next Steps” in one single place.

With the particular DVD I mentioned, if it doesn’t get here by tomorrow, I take one of these pieces of information, the email contact and immediately email them.

There’s no looking for that information, you know, searching your email inbox for that dang email receipt, or searching their website all over again.
In the email, I of course include the Order number that they originally gave me, because all of that info is in one place that I know how to find.

If I’m not near a computer to email, I create a TO-DO on the Palm by swiping my stylus over the email in the memo. ( the swipe action is from using a Palm product called pTools).

Very obvious and simple, but I never thought to do things this way.

The best result from this is that I don’t get irritated when I see either UPS, or the mailman delivering their packages here in the apt complex, and I still don’t get mine delivered. I already have a known schedule of actions I will take, and the package will make it sooner or later. If not, the worst case is that I dispute the purchase through my credit card, but I’ve never had to do that.

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