A Simple Productivity Hack To Get Things Done and Achieve Your Goals

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed out with all the things you have to do, a brain dump may be just what you need to organize your thoughts and take acton.

What is a Brain Dump?

A Brain Dump is something I originally learned about in David Allen’s fantastic book Getting Things Done and have since simplified it with my own methods. The essence of brain dumping is the key thought that our minds are meant to create ideas, not hold them. Brain dumping is a process that allows you to empty your mind of your thoughts, capture them, and then take action.

How to Brain Dump

Think of your brain like a coffee cup or jar of jellybeans. Each can only hold so much until it starts to overflow. And that is exactly the same feeling you get when you have all these things that you need and want to do locked up inside your head and never let them out. You walk around feeling overwhelmed like the coffee cup spilling over or the jar of overflowing jelly beans. And what happens to that coffee and those jelly beans when there is no more room? They get lost because there’s nothing to hold them. The same is true of your thoughts. And some of those thoughts and ideas might be the kind that will make a real difference in your life. You don’t want to lose them. A brain dump can not only be cathartic, but it can also be the foundation for the changes you want to make in your life.

Step 1 – Empty and Capture

Here’s how to do it. Once you start, I guarantee you will feel more in control of your destiny than ever before. There are lots of methods to do a brain dump, but my favorite is as follows. Set aside 20 min. I usually do mine weekly on Sunday night as it helps me prepare for the week ahead. Put on some relaxing music. Whatever you like. Turn off everything else that may interrupt you, you know what they are. Get some index cards and a sharpie or grab a pen and paper or your laptop. I prefer index cards because it makes it easy to sort your items. Then just start to write down all those things you need and want to do. No matter how big or small. Don’t judge, just list each item giving one card or line per item. Don’t try to prioritize or categorize right now unless this helps your thought process. Keep listing anything that comes to mind. Sometimes you may not think of a specific to-do or task. Maybe it’s a feeling or just a random thought. That’s okay, write it down anyway. Here’s a sample of what mine looks like to give you an idea:

  • Fix floor in bathroom
  • Plan out meals for the week
  • Research Facebook Advertising
  • Surf more
  • Call my Mom more
  • Research team sports for my son
  • Get a new desk for my wife
  • Wake up earlier
  • Wash the dog

And the list goes on. But hopefully you get the idea and you can see there really doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to the order in which these things came to me. And all i did was just write them down as they bubbled up to the surface.

How long should you do this? if it’s your first time, your first brain dump will probably be longer, but I find for me 20 minutes feels pretty good and gives me enough time to not only think about the things I need to do, but the things I want to do as well. So give yourself the full 20 min and see how it goes. It’s not about quantity or quality, but just making sure you write down and capture everything that comes to the surface.

I find the whole process a little bit like tossing a bag of popcorn in the microwave. At first, the thoughts come slow, then in the middle things really start popping, and then towards the end things seem to slow down and I have a sense of being finished as I stare down at all the items I’ve captured.

Step 2 – Organize and Categorize

You’ve already done the hard work and emptied out some of that coffee cup. You may now feel a little overwhelmed with all the things you have written down, but rest assured that these things are no longer spilling over and over again inside your head weighing you down. Now that they’re captured, you can start to break them down and take action. Next, you’ll want to categorize your items. There’s no set rule for how to categorize, but here’s my preferred method.

Create 3 piles of cards or 3 lists. The first is for “Must Do.” The second is “Want to Do.” And the third is “Other.” Put any thoughts that don’t fit under “Must Do” or “Want to Do” into your “Other” pile.

Step 3 – Prioritize

Once your items are sorted, you can now start to prioritize. There are also many ways to prioritize, but it usually comes down to just 2 questions:

How urgent is the item?

How important is the item?

I typically follow my gut rather than introduce some sort of scoring methodology to prioritize items. I consider the urgency and importance of each item and  then move what I consider the highest priority items to the top. Sometimes you may find tasks that are a part of a larger task or idea. You can group these items together.

Once you have your items prioritized within their respective lists, there’s one more step you may want to take to help you determine which items you’ll tackle first. Look at all your items and identify whether each item is “Big, Medium, or Small” in terms of how long it will take to complete. Once you do this, you may find you have smaller less important items that you can knock out and get done with little effort. You should move some of these smaller items to the top of your lists. You may also find that you have larger effort items that you may want to break into smaller tasks.

Step 4 – Take Action

If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have what’s starting to look like a prioritized action plan for getting things done. Your last step is to determine your plan of action. I recommend the 1-3-5 method for starting your plan of action. In the 1-3-5 method you identify which items you’re going to tackle first. It can be for the year, month, week, or day depending on the scope of items you want to get done.

The basic idea of the 1-3-5 method is to pick 1 Big item to start working on, 3 Medium sized items, and 5 Small items. The benefit of this is that your action item list is limited to 9 things. You still have all the other items from your brain dump that you can add to your action items list as you complete them, but for now the goal is to focus on these 9 things and get them done first.

Final Thoughts

That’s it! If you’ve followed the steps above, you should now have identified 9 things you’re ready to get done. You have a plan for how to tackle them. And you’ve also taken the time to empty your head and capture all those thoughts that may have been weighing you down or causing stress.

And now whenever you feel like the coffee cup in your head is spilling over or the jellybeans in your mind are cascading onto the floor, you can do a brain dump to refocus your priorities and take steps to live the life you want.

Try Orgzee.com for your Brain Dump

If you want to dive in and try a brain dump right now there’s a great free application you can use at Orgzee.com. You don’t need cards or paper. Orgzee allows you to create a board of cards and then you can drag and drop those cards into categories. It makes the whole brain dump very easy to do. And because it works on desktop or mobile, you always have your action plan with you.

My weekly brain dump helps me feel empowered, more in control of my life, and makes sure I’m spending my time on the things that matter most. I hope this simple system does the same for you.

Featured photo credit:Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash