A death pile almost never starts as a decision — it starts as intake that got deferred one day, then became two days, then became a corner of the garage. A fixed daily intake sequence removes the decision point where that deferral happens: instead of "should I deal with this now," the sequence just runs.
The four-step sequence
- 1
Decide: keep, return, or discard
Before an item touches a shelf, make the keep/reject call. An item that shouldn't have been bought doesn't need a SKU, a location, or a place in the queue — it needs to leave the building.
- 2
Record: assign a SKU and log the basics
For anything kept, assign its permanent SKU and record acquisition date, cost, and category immediately — while the details are still fresh, not from memory three days later.
- 3
Stage: route to the right queue
Photo-ready items go straight to the photography queue; anything needing cleaning, testing, or repair goes to that queue instead (see the companion article on organizing that queue) — never straight to a general shelf with no next step attached.
- 4
File: assign and record its physical location
Every item gets a location ID the same day it's staged, not "whenever there's a free shelf" — an item without a recorded location is functionally lost even if it's sitting six feet away.
Why same-day matters more than batch size
The failure mode this workflow is built to prevent isn't slow intake — it's deferred intake. Ten items processed the day they arrive is a healthier system than fifty items processed once a week, because the backlog between arrival and processing is exactly where items get forgotten, double-bought, or lost track of.
Adapting the sequence to your sourcing pattern
- Daily sourcing (thrift/estate runs several times a week): run the sequence at a fixed time each day, even for a single item — consistency matters more than batch size.
- Occasional bulk sourcing (an estate sale or storage-unit lot): the sequence still applies per item, but budget a longer single session rather than trying to spread one big lot's intake across many partial days.
- Mixed sourcing: whichever items arrived that day still get the same four steps before end of day, regardless of how they were acquired.