Unscramble Your Brain
The undervalued value of doing a productivity brain dump
Welcome to “All the Tasks Fit to Print,” my weekly newsletter on all issues productivity related for authors and other solopreneurs!
I've been asked a lot about the "brain dump" step of organizing your time and projects. People want to know how to do it and what should be included in it, and honestly, I was confused by the questions at first. It was a knowledge trap, though – that is, something I have known about for so long that I assume everyone else knows about it too! I ignorantly thought that just telling people "do a brain dump!" was enough.
Not for the first time, I was wrong.
Why Important Tho'?
People think that if they just make The Perfect To-Do List (be it a calendar/planner or a plain old list) then they will get everything done! Ta da! Stupendous!
…except for the many, many ways that it does not work, at all, ever.
I find that part of the problem is that my clients put everything on those lists they think they should do, while also not putting on those lists things they must do. However, deep in your brain, there isn't much of a difference between those two types of things (something I learned from the joy (sarcasm) of having generalized anxiety for most of my life). They are free-floating Things To Do, and your brain is scrambling them, sometimes randomly, often unhelpfully. Like eggs being whipped up for breakfast, all of your tasks feel urgent and messy as they all get swirled around in your brain.
Eggs you can cook, though. Tasks? Not so much. But what if you could unscramble your thoughts the way you cannot unscramble eggs?
That is where the classic productivity tool "brain dump" comes in.
For the same reason that journaling about your feelings, reactions, and thoughts can help you offload them in a useful way for analyzing and sorting, a "Productivity Brain Dump" can "unscramble the eggs" of your tasks lists. The reason this works, and why it is so often recommended, is because the act of offloading thoughts and feelings helps them to be processed by your conscious mind and thereby frees up your mental resources. It's not magic, it's just as simple as clearing off the clutter so you can see what your desk looks like.
In fact, there is a fair amount of research showing that offloading your thoughts frees up mental resources. This is often used in therapy and other forms of counseling, and is just as true in a clinical setting as it is for people trying to wrangle with their productivity.
It is important to note that it is not a solution in and of itself. It is Step One of the Solution! But it is a very important step. Some people love doing brain dumps regularly (once a week or every month) while others just do them when they start feeling overwhelmed. Most time management systems start with having the user do a brain dump, and my Personal Projects Management (PPM) method is no different: everything starts out from the initial brain dump.
But WHAT is it?
Honestly, a brain dump can take a lot of forms. It can be a list; it can be pile of sticky notes; it can be a recording.
The important thing to understand is that brain dumps are a form of "metacognition," a way to think about what we are thinking. Everyone already knows how to do this, so don't worry about the fancy language. If you've ever spent any time thinking about a reaction you had to a situation (good or bad), done any kind of talk therapy, or journaled about your feelings, then you're already an expert at metacognition!
However, unlike journaling or free association writing, brain dumps serve a dual purpose:
Clear out the brain (unscramble it)
Sort out the brain (organize it)
This is why a brain dump should be your first step in any path toward figuring out your time management/project management approach. But it's also why it's so hard to explain to people what a brain dump should look like: it is a very individual process. What is in your brain, and how your brain processes information, is unique to you.
That doesn't mean it has to be complicated or difficult, though.
How to Unscramble
Usually, advice on how to do a brain dump suggests just sitting down and letting all your tasks and worries spill out over the page. If that works for you, grand! Go do that!
If you are scratching your head wondering what that feels like, what should be written down (or not), where the best place is to put all of these things, then stay with me:
First, we need to figure out how you are most comfortable accessing those thoughts. If sitting down to do it like a school assignment makes you feel anxious, then that's not a good way to approach this. Instead, think about when you are most overwhelmed and worried about all the things you need to do. When you first wake up? When you lie in bed trying to go to sleep? When you are at the pickup line at your kid's school? Whenever that time is, plan to do your brain dump then.
While you can do a thorough brain dump at any time of the day, doing it when your brain is already scrambling those tasks up is a really good way to make sure you are tapping into all the things that are bugging you.
Second, how you offload is entirely up to you. As stated earlier, you can write a list or make a recording. You can use a whiteboard, or sticky notes, or a mind-map. You will need to be able to access what you are offloading from your brain later, though, so just yelling at trees won't work. If you do an audio or video recording, use a service like otter.ai to transcribe what you've said, so you can re-sort it all and organize it later.
Third, do not put judgement values on what you offload. This is not the time to prioritize or organize! It is absolutely fine to go from big picture goals (start a business, get a degree, plan to run a marathon) to micro tasks (do the laundry, feed the dog, remember the orange juice). In fact swinging back and forth between complex and simple tasks is a sign that your brain dump is effective!
Fouth (and finally!), the only filter you need to put in place is "no full sentences." Okay, yes, a sentence can be just two words (verb and noun), so don't take this too much to heart! What this rule is designed to do is to keep you from going down the alleyways of long explanations and descriptions. Now is not the time to figure out how to accomplish a task, or consider the stakeholders, or determine a deadline. Just the facts, ma'am!!!!
Eventually, the goal is to take your brain dump and organize it. There are a lot of ways to do that, but my suggestion (as outlined in the PPM method) is to assign each item/task listed to one of your guideposts, that is, one of the primary enterprises of your life (such as your business, or family/relationships, or education). I have found that keeping things fairly broad at this stage helps you bring focus to the projects your are working on. YMMV, and there are certainly a lot of other ways to organize the output of a brain dump (such as GTD, or the Eisenhower Matrix).
Whatever you eventually do with the results of your brain dump, chances are good that just doing the exercise itself will bring clarity and focus to all the things you are working on. There is no wrong way to do it, no way to fail! Give is a shot! And let me know how it works for you, as I'd love your feedback.
I am the Queen of To-Do Lists. They work for me because I've always been a save-the-best-for-last kind of person. To that end, today I'm cleaning old boxes, mouse nests, mouse poop, and dead rodents out of the attic of the old family garage. Ick!