Dan In Focus

Our guest writer is Thom Stratton. He has an MBA, worked on a newspaper, writes Simple Self Reliance (a blog on recapturing lost arts of doing it yourself), worked as a requirements analyst, actually understands social media marketing and is at least ten times smarter than me. He also started a business this year, too.

I’m a firm believer in David Allen’s precept that your mind is not free to function at full capacity until it is able to let go of all the things you need to remember. It can only do this, however, if you have a good, reliable system for capturing and maintaining the list of all the things it would otherwise need to remember for you. Getting to that point, at least initially, is accomplished by doing what he calls a “Brain-Sweep”.

A Brain-Sweep is essentially a brainstorming of everything that needs to be done. You write everything down without trying to deal with it in any way until you feel like you’ve gotten everything out of your head. I’m often reminded of the imagery from Harry Potter when Dumbledore extracts memories from his own head to store in his magical basin, the pensieve.

Allen’s approach is to devote a day or more going to each physical location where you do work, looking at everything you have that represents a possible “thing to do”, or at least worry about, and catalog it. While I’m sure it’s a helpful approach, it takes a long time. And from my own experience of having achieved a becalmed mind before, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary.

It may even be counterproductive, actually. If you go looking for things to do, you’ll always find some. It may be as insignificant as “find a place to stick my spare change”, but it’ll be another item on your list. Once on your list, you have to take the time to deal with it, even if it’s to decide not to do anything about it. So purposely making your list as large as you can make it can actually stress you out more (look at all the stuff I’ve got to do!!!), and make you take longer sorting through it all instead of just getting on to the stuff that’s most important.

So for my part I believe in doing your brain sweep only until you’re reasonably sure you’ve got all the really important stuff. Then you start dealing with it. Yes, more stuff will come up that perhaps you should have captured before, but it won’t take any longer to capture it and deal with it now than it would have to try and remember it all before moving on.

I also have to question whether it is necessary to physically put yourself in each workspace in order to do your brain sweep. Yes, it can help, and I do use that approach at times. But here are a few other strategies I’ve used to help me brain sweep wherever I may be (ie. waiting at the dentist’s office this morning):

• Mentally picture a location and make your mind walk around there. I do this when sweeping for tasks and honey-dos around home. I take a mental walk through my house, purposely picturing details in each room, on each wall, etc. Pretty soon I’m remembering “Oh yeah, that curtain rod needs reinforcing”.
• Review your current roles. Think about each role you fill in life. For example, in addition to my work, I’m a father, a husband, a church music director, an HOA president, and a guest blogger. Just spending a few minutes thinking about things I’d like to accomplish in each of those roles is likely to yield at least a half-dozen task for each role.
• Review your list of tasks. Quite often just looking at some of the tasks on my list and starting to think about what each might entail will shake loose another (sometimes even unrelated) task I may have forgotten.
• Group your task list. I sometimes find that in going through my list of tasks and starting to group them by context or location I will start to make new mental connections that unearth related tasks. It’s almost as if we have to sneak up on memories from unexpected directions in order to flush them out.

So far I’ve found that by trying some or most of these strategies I am able to sweep out most of the most irksome, stress-inducing tasks. Perhaps the resulting catharsis from Allen’s method is even more pleasant, but I find that just getting the majority of my more important tasks down is often enough to let my mind relax. It also allows me to not get bogged down in creating too large a list and instead move on to managing my tasks.

This in turn allows me to get on to building up the habits of capturing all new tasks as they come along. At that point it doesn’t matter if a task is a new one, or an old one that was overlooked initially. The minute it surfaces I can capture it and manage it.

Most importantly, these strategies help me get past the initial brain sweep stage. If I had to find even four uninterrupted hours in my current schedule I’d probably never get organized. These strategies can be used wherever you are, and with as much or as little time as you have available.

If you have the time to give it the “Full Allen”, then great! I suspect it would be a valuable experience. But I’ve also seen (and been) people fail from not being able to settle for “good enough” and pursue “perfect” to the point of burnout. It need not be an all-or-nothing venture with Allen’s system–sometimes just getting started and growing into it may even work better.

I write this having just completed my brain sweep at the dentist’s office this morning. I know I don’t have everything captured yet, but I’ve got enough that my mind feels comfortable with my list. It knows that accomplishing what is on it will feel really good. I’m ready to move on into setting up my tools and my routine. More on that after I’ve got some progress to report.