The Value of the Weekend Brain Dump
One of my favorite things to do on a lazy Friday afternoon (when I have to work, but I already have a few posts and I’m a little confused) is to do a brain dump.
This post was originally published on The Simple Dollar .
What is a brain dump?
The Brain Dump is an idea I got from David Allen’s excellent book, How It’s Done , which I have praised and discussed a lot in the past. I found that, over and over again, it was a very powerful tool that made me feel more in control of my life and helped me focus on completing things rather than stressing, even if I didn’t make a commitment. complete Getting Things Done system.
Here is the main clue to all of this. There is a tendency in my life – and probably in your life too – to allow little undone things to accumulate, and sometimes even large ones. Usually these things fall right into the category of “important but not urgent” things that you should be doing. These are important things, but they don’t have strict deadlines, so it’s easy to put them off for now.
These things can be financial in nature, like signing up for a 401 (k) or budgeting for You Need a Budget, or filling out some tax filings next year, or closing drafts before winter. They can also be non-financial in nature, such as cleaning the toilet or making a good meal plan for the next week.
These things get stuck in your head over time, regularly distracting you from the things you need to do. You focus on a task, and then one of those small important but non-urgent tasks will pop into your head, and you will think about how to complete it today or this weekend … and then, boom, your train of thought is thwarted. Because of this crash, you can lose productivity at work and even be out of time at home.
The brain dump is the solution to all of this. This is how it works.
Get a few sheets of paper (or a pocket notebook ) and a pen. You may prefer to do it electronically, but I find it better for me to do it using analogue instruments like this.
Then start listing everything in your head. Just write down all the outstanding tasks and outstanding projects that you have stored in your brain. You can also (and should) look around your desk and personal items for inspiration to remind you of things that don’t quite cross your mind.
I usually suggest leaving this list on your desk or desk for at least a few hours, if not an entire day. Keep coming back to it and adding things as they come to your mind. Just write it down as soon as it comes to you in the head, and then go back to that for which you have worked.
What you will quickly discover is that it suddenly becomes much easier to focus on your day and easier to focus on the task at hand. Your mind won’t be distracted by these unfulfilled tasks – and if they do, you can either write them down quickly or remind yourself that you’ve already written them down and that you’re going to tackle that list later.
You will also find that your list is very long. At least every time I do this, there are about 100 or so items on my list. This may sound overwhelming, but don’t worry just yet.
Another tip: I usually recommend people make this list on Thursday or Friday. You should do this on Thursday if you expect them to be mostly professional items (or at least have a significant portion of professional items), or Friday if you expect them to be mostly personal items.
Brain dump treatment
So, you have a large list of items. Now what?
The first thing to do – and this is what I suggest doing in the evening after you’ve spent the day building this big brain dump – is to organize it a bit. Define anything in the list that is a separate action. For me, an offline activity is something that I can do in half an hour or less. I usually copy all of this into a new list, which I call my “to do” list.
If something looks like a separate activity, try breaking it down into two or three separate activities that need to be done in order. Then I usually copy the first of these individual actions into a new list of “actions” and leave the rest in the old list. Sometimes, if it’s just a couple of actions, I’ll copy both of them and draw an arrow between them to indicate that they are linked.
This will leave you with some big projects – things that will take at least a couple of hours to complete. Go through all of these projects and decide if there are any of them that you think you should take care of in the very near future, and if you can postpone some of them until later. For those that you can defer, create a new list and move them all to this new list – I call it the Someday list.
That leaves you with a few big projects that you feel you need to get started on as soon as possible. For each of these projects, I take a new piece of paper and start breaking them down into stages. Basically, I’m just making an ordered list of “individual activities” – things that I can do in about half an hour. Some of these steps may depend on others before you can get started, which is fine – just write it down and move on. Then, when you have done this for each project, copy the first separate step for each of those projects into your list of “actions”.
You end up with a long list of activities, each taking half an hour or less.
Saturday Brain Dump
Then just get up nicely and early Saturday morning (or Friday morning if you’re going to be doing a lot of professional tasks at work) and just dig through this list of “activities” you’ve put together. Make it a goal to spend all day removing items from this list so they are ready and no longer take up space in your head.
When I do this, my list is often 50 or so items, and on a good day I can drop half of that list.
Trust me, this is good . In fact, the day is incredibly busy, but at the end of the day, when you think about everything you’ve taken care of … it’s incredibly pleasant, as if you’ve scratched the incredible itch that has been bothering you for months. … You feel a mixture of pride in how much you actually did that day, mixed with a sense of relief that all of these things were taken into account, mixed also with a more subtle sense of excitement about the future, because you feel that a heaviness fell. your mind.
For me, “brain dump Saturdays” often stretch to Sundays. Over a full weekend, I can often throw away most of my list, leaving me with a rather small pile of unfinished things and a much clearer mind as a result of all this accomplishment.
Final thoughts
While I maintain a fairly robust to-do list system, inspired in part by the complete system described in Getting Started , there are still things that sometimes don’t work for me. I’ll forget to write down a task or two, or find that the things on my to-do list after a while don’t quite reflect what’s important to me.
So, about once every few months, I do one of these brain dumps. I usually do a big dump on Friday morning and then leave the list for the whole day so I can add things to it when it comes to my mind. On Friday night, I’ll convert it into a giant to-do list for Saturday and Sunday, and then spend the weekend doing the tasks that were on my mind and left unfulfilled.
By the end of Saturday I feel great . I have done so many things that remain unfinished. I feel like a champion . For the next weeks or two, I feel incredibly focused on what I need to accomplish. I feel like I can handle everything .
This system has helped me tremendously. I hope you find it helpful too.
The meaning of ‘brain dump friday’ | Simple dollar