The Weekly Download

It’s very often difficult to get things done and stay focused if your mind is cluttered with an overwhelming amount of commitments and tasks that need to get done. Stress and a reduced Productivity result with poor vision and creativity being offsets of this overloaded mindset.

The Solution: The Mind Dump

The Mind Dump is a way to get everything out of your head and into a system, a system that you can organize and systematically get things done. The Mind Dump can be done on paper or in a Note in Microsoft Outlook or similar Email tool. My personal favourite method is to use notes in Outlook as it allows you to transfer the tasks you have just identified or downloaded into your system directly. You can plan and schedule what need to get done, taking you a step closer to getting it done.
The Method:

Sit in a quite space and start to write or type everything that comes into your mind, from a large project which needs to be started to collecting your suit from the dry cleaners. Any responsibilities or commitments that need to be taken care of. Treat the process like you would a brainstorming exercise, do not edit or categorise what comes out of your head just list everything as quickly as possible, don’t try and stall the download just let it flow! The first time you do this it may take 20 mins it make take a half hour but you will find that after time the time involved will decrease substantially as all commitments and tasks come under control.

The Next Step:

Now use the information to get organized , any task that can go into your diary or calendar schedule time for it , smaller tasks like making phone calls and sending emails can go into a categorized list in tasks or into a to do list in a notebook. The trick is to have all your tasks planned in some way so that your mind is no longer responsible for remembering all of this information. You will experience a huge stress release when you know that you have captured everything in your system.

If a task is large for example renovating the kitchen, plan the next step in the process. E.g. contact builder and schedule that task or use the 2 minute rule. If a task will take less than 2 minutes do it now! This strategy will help the procrastinators out there. You could also create a project plan for the renovation using a mind mapping tool such as Mindmanger from Mindjet.  Mindmaps are a great way to plan a project and give a great visual picture of what you want to achieve.