CLEARING THE MENTAL FOG
Photo by @fotosbyfaj
Once you start decluttering your space, you’ll want to do the same for your head.
Outside Feng Shui world, people overlook the mental baggage they drag around their days. Things to do, people too’ve been promising to contact, dreams to fulfil….one day.
As David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done “the brain is not a repository”. It’s for thinking, not for storing.
Like many people, I was greatly inspired by this book. To this day, I still incorporate many of his strategies to keep on top of all the ‘stuff’ that 21st century life brings.
And that includes the clutter in my head. So whenever my brain starts to feel ‘foggy’ I do a brain dump. (And no, this term is not deemed offensive. Google it.)
The goal of this exercise is to
(A) empty my head
(B) to categorise everything in order to
(C) prioritise next steps
Often you’ve offloaded everything, you’ll find that you can discard much of it. It’s either outdated, or irrelevant yet i't’s been clinging onto out To Do list for too long.
MATERIALS
You’ll need:
A large sheet of paper or card. An old piece of wallpaper is perfect.
Small post-it notes (I find 5cm x 5cm perfect for the task.) Alternatively, you could use small pieces of paper plus sellotape or blu-tak.
METHOD
Start your brain dump: write one thought or idea per post-it and dump it on the paper. This works because each thought is given equal ‘weight’. You’re not prioritising the items yet, as you normally do when writing a To Do list.
Keep going until you head is empty.
Now start categorising. You will instinctively know what goes together - whether if’s HOUSE, WORK, WEEKEND PROJECTS - MUST DO, WEEKEND PROJECTS - MAYBE ONE DAY. (David Allen recommended a ‘NICE TO HAVE / DO ONE DAY’ folder.)
Be creative in your categories. You may choose CHEAP, EXPENSIVE or QUICK WINS or PEOPLE TO TEXT HELLO, PEOPLE TO ORGANISE A COFFEE WITH.
Once everything is grouped together, I select the most important items in the list.
OPTIONAL Sometimes I take photos of each cateogry. For big projects I might hang the paper on the wall. In this situation I tape the post-its to prevent them falling off. For big categories, I’lI copy its items to a mindmap to use it going forward as a list of things to do, yet still resisting the need to list them in terms of priority - because life and projects evolve. What seems important today may not be so important tomorrow.
Through completing this task, you realise how much duplication you’re carrying around but also how much stuff is well out of date.
I do this regularly to minimise and eliminate the junk that constantly builds up. I recommend you do too.
During the brain dump.
After categorising the post-its.
