De-Clutter your Brain
Do you ever wonder how you will know when your brain is too full to store any more information? For me it happens when I get stuck - with so many small tasks and details swirling - that I am left unable to decide what to work on or where to even begin. We all have so much information coming at us on a daily or hourly basis - too much to gather up and keep.
If your brain was great at tracking and storing information, you would always remember things when you needed to (and not an hour or a day later). Have you ever come home from runnings errands and then remembered the one item you forgot to pick up? Of course you have. Your brain is not a good storage unit; too many good ideas come up as a distraction and / or get lost when you are in the middle of doing something else. Your brain is being wasted when it's used as a storage unit; It is much better at problem solving and generating ideas than it is at storing or holding all your thoughts in place until you need them.
Here is an idea for helping to de-clutter your brain. Move that information out of your brain and into the "next steps" - doing something with it. You can call this a mind dump, a brain clearing activity or just a way to get clarity on all the stuff you think you need to do. Take the time to sit and write down every single thing or task that is taking up space in your mind. Keep writing out any idea, thought or action that comes to mind without trying to sort or go into details. The best practice I have found is to write each thing on a separate piece of paper. This allows me to easily sort them into categories for the next step.
I sort the list into areas that make sense to me. All time related items go on my schedule as an action or a reminder of an upcoming time-sensitive deadline. I have a "great idea" folder or pile - things that are interesting, but that I don’t have time to dive into right now. I have a "someday / maybe" pile for things that would be nice to do but are not really important or a priority. Once they go into that pile, I don’t have to keep thinking about them anymore.
The biggest value I get from this exercise is that I can then pull out or create projects. Any collection of things I am working on which require more than one step are considered projects. They each get a page or note on my computer, so I can track them and move them along with actions - one step at a time. Once I have a good list of all the projects I have going, it is much easier for me to manage them and I get much better at saying no to new things. This alone saves me from getting overwhelmed.
I give credit to the mind dump idea and many of my organizational systems to David Allen, author of Getting Things Done Fast. The bottom line is that you need to find or create a system, make it one that works for you, and put it to use on a regular basis. I do a mind clearing exercise at least once a week to keep me on track.
Lately, I have come across quite a bit that's being written on the topic of multitasking. Science supports the fact that multitasking, although essential for most of us, yields poorer performance (on any one of those tasks) versus focusing on one task at a time.
It's a departure from my norm, but when I have really important tasks or projects, I reign myself in and have to mentally flip a switch - so that I can give my undivided attention to it. It doesn't come naturally to me, but it's applied effort for me to concentrate my focus on just that one thing (at a time). :)
