Using a brain dump to reduce overwhelm
That overwhelming feeling of having your head full of stuff you need to get done? We’re going to solve that.
The way I like to start off any kind of big work process is by brain dumping everything. I find that this is helpful anytime of the day. Doing it at night before you go to bed, doing it in the morning when you get up, doing it at your desk when you first sit down; a brain dump is a really, really good way of being able to not have things in your subconscious that are tapping you on the shoulder and distracting to you.
I like to do it the same way I get the kids to clean up—I put on a song! I go, okay, from the start of this song to the end of this song I'm going to write down everything that's in my head. It could be a to-do that’s nagging me, a bill that needs to be paid, an appointment I need to book; all of that stuff. Not just work related—brain dump EVERYTHING. Don’t limit yourself to work-related items. This exercise is only effective if you truly use it to clear your mind.
Once you have your brain dump, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty.
Your brain dump has no-doubt uncovered a lot of tasks from different areas of your life—and that’s a good thing! So grab a separate piece of paper and start to divide all of these tasks into different categories based on their priority.
I like to work with the following categories:
A: Important and Urgent
B: Important but not Urgent
C: Not important but Urgent
D: Not Important. Not Urgent.
Prioritising your brain dump gives you a good indication of what you need to tackle first.
Don't be tempted to only put the things on your list that are going to be the easiest. ALL of the things that need to be done should be on your list. You need to be able to have the discipline to stick to doing the As before you get to the Bs.
Once I have all of those on a list and I've delegated out different priorities to them, I put them on my to-do list for the week.
I put all of my “As” into the top 4 places on my “must do” list, but I also add anything from my B list that I consider a quick task. I find that when I first sit down at my computer, it's really good to do a couple of quick tasks that help you feel like you're achieving, to give you momentum, so that then you're like, "Yeah, I'm kicking goals today. Here we go. Give me something else." So I'm talking about things that are not going to take more than three minutes, so don't stick something on your quick tasks list that you're going to be doing for the next hour or so.
Then I put “people I need to call” in their own separate section. That means when I'm in the car waiting for school pickup, and I think, "Ah, I've got three minutes here. Who did I need to call?" I don't need to go back and shuffle through the entire big list, I can immediately go to that call section and go, "Right, these are the two people I need to call. Let's give the first one a try." And I find that that enables me to kind of mark that off the list really easily. I always check my call list on my to-dos as my car is backing out of the garage. I go, "Who do I need to call now?" Because I'm about to drive 10 minutes into town and that time could be really useful.
I take the exact same approach with “things I need to buy”; I want to be able to access that list easily when I have the opportunity to get to the shops.
I also create a list of “things for later”, and then of course, there's life admin. When I'm talking about life admin, I'm talking about things like making the vet appointment, making sure that that permission note is in the school bag and so on.
And down the bottom, I have two special sections. The first is for appointments and meetings, and the second is for me to say “okay, if I had my day again, what would I do differently?” What perhaps didn't I get to or didn't I achieve?
So that's my to-do list and that's what it looks like! I hope that you find that valuable and you can find a way to mesh your goals to what you're doing on a daily basis.