Productivity | Net Profit News

How To Brain Dump Tasks To Increase Your Productivity

January 15th, 2009

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I’m going through Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productive (currently closed) video training program (Eben is fast becoming my favorite mentor) and one of the first starter tasks is to write down everything you are thinking about so you can “clear your mental desk”.

This reminded me of a technique I first came across from John Reese called the “brain dump”. Neither John or Eben invented these techniques of course, but that doesn’t really matter. John’s Brain Dump is slightly different to Eben’s clear your mental desk, but the principle is the same.

The idea is to get everything out of your head on to paper so you can stop thinking about it. As an entrepreneur - or just a human - we have a lot of things we need to do and keep track of, especially if you have a family as well.

When I returned home from overseas as expected there were a lot of little things that needed to be done. My lawn had grown to about a meter high, and needed cutting. My house needed a good clean. I had to buy food, pay bills, sort out my car registration, and all kinds of odd things - and this doesn’t even include the business tasks!

Over the first few weeks my brain kept collecting things I had to do and storing them for later. As I worked on the computer and walked around my house, certain objects or emails would trigger a reminder of something that needed to get done. This actually causes stress as your brain is constantly feeling the pressure of needing to do something but not actually getting it done.

I’m fairly good at dealing with that kind of stress as I tell myself to be patient and get it done when I can, but that doesn’t make the problem go away and of course, the task needs to get done eventually. It pays to become aware of how you think when it comes to task accumulation in your brain.

This is not a new problem for me, but thanks to Eben’s course I was reminded of a solution to help deal with mental clutter, especially during periods of new starts, in my case returning home from overseas and the new year beginning.