Productivity Hack: A Brain Dump Can Organize Your Thoughts
Is there ever a time when you feel so worried, stressed, or anxious about something that you cannot focus on anything else? Most of us have experienced this dilemma where our heads are overcrowded with so many thoughts that we feel overwhelmed. Ultimately, this doesn't help in completing our workload either which makes things a little more frustrating.
The best course of action in such situations is to do a brain dump. Imagine it as clearing your desktop of clutter. It is much easier for the brain to function when there are not too many things stored there.
So, what’s a brain dump?
The idea of a brain dump is to gather all your unorganised thoughts and toss them onto a blank canvas. It's like dumping all the confusion, disorder, and mess in your thoughts onto portions of perhaps more orderly places - in this case, paper!
Brain dumps are mostly common for someone who maintains a blog, a journal, or a planner. Subsequently, brain dumps are also helpful in an educational context. For instance, someone studying for an exam might do a brain dump by writing down everything they can recall about what they've learned.
Putting all that's on your mind in writing can help you start your day with a clear focus. When writing information quickly and not having time to organise it, brain dumps can help you be more efficient.
Why Do Brain Dumps Work?
How is it that something so simple as putting feelings and thoughts into writing has such great benefits?
Increases Productivity
It's hard to focus when you have so many thoughts running through your mind. It's at that point that we start procrastinating, which is bad for our mental health and productivity. When we keep things floating around in our minds, they seem to be bigger and more daunting than when we put them on paper. Whenever you brain dump, think of it as releasing something that is stressing you out or disturbing you from your mind. The pressure inside of you typically lessens after writing these things down, which helps us in managing our task.
2. Sparks Creativity
By 'freeing' your mind from the chaos and unorganised thoughts, you can find ideas from different directions and angles, allowing you to think more clearly. Additionally, this allows you to flourish your creative side by coming up with new, innovative solutions or ideas in approaching your tasks or goals.
3. Enables Us in Reintegrating with Our Goals and Passions
If we give our minds a chance to calm down after a brain dump, the extra mental space allows our minds to refocus and get back to what we enjoy. We can sometimes feel disconnected and burned out when our minds are uncluttered, making it hard to focus and maintain our mental energy.
Losing your ability to focus is one of the worst symptoms of burnout. Feeling overwhelmed makes it harder to maintain your attention, which means your productivity slips, and you're more likely to work longer or lose sight of your goals. By brain dumping, this breaks the vicious cycle of losing focus.
In general, writing things down in a brain dump increases your chances of achieving what you write down. Providing that they are associated with goals, ideas, and aspirations for the future. The reason for this is that writing things down makes you more likely to act on them. The importance of taking notes lies in the fact that you are taking the time to think about and process what you are doing and what you need to do.
How to Organise Your Mind with Brain Dump
Brain dumping is easy and doesn’t require any magic tricks in decluttering your mind. All you need is pen and paper! You could also use a journal or other productivity applications, like Evernote, Notion or a free note app.
Once everything is ready just start writing! Write everything in your mind, and you can worry about the ‘tidying’ later. After all, the first step of brain dumping is decluttering your mind.
Next step is categorising each thought into sections, or if you want to be creative, you can use a color coding system or other effective systems that can help you in prioritising your tasks or goals like the Eisenhower Matrix.
If you’re feeling stuck with your brain dump exercises, you can try starting with these brain dump prompts to get help you get started and deal with your thoughts:
What are your main goals for the day/week/month?
Can you think of a stressful tasks in your life that you’re avoiding?
What will truly make you happy?
How are you generally feeling at the moment?
Are you devoting enough time for self care?
What do you need to let go of?
How can you best organise your upcoming appointments, tasks, or goals?
Do you have any work projects you want to start?
What hobbies are you most interested in and why?
Are spending enough time offline?
Happy brain dumping : )