You must use your mind to get things off your mind.
David Allen – Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Capturing your thoughts might be the lowest hanging fruit with the biggest impact on how focused you go through your day.
One of the main things that keeps us from focused work is our thoughts:
- Circling thoughts
- Worrying thoughts
- Wandering thoughts
- Entertaining thoughts
The best example of this in action is this scenario we’ve all experienced:
We have created the perfect work environment
- The table is organized and clean
- Nobody is loud or makes any distracting noise
- We magically have a few hours with no meetings
It’s just us and the laptop… and our thoughts.
Even being in this environment we, more often than not, get distracted by the things going on in our minds. Some days it’s better. Some days it’s manageable. And some days, it simply seems like it’s impossible to get focused work done.
So today, I’ll share with you a short technique you can do in the morning before you start your workday to capture everything that’s going on in your mind.
Writing down our thoughts has three distinct benefits
- It transfers what was before just in our mind to something external that we can come back to later. Often, our thoughts move in circles because the only place we have them stored is in our mind.
- It enables us to focus. Since we now are not preoccupied with the “remembering”, we are now free to do the “thinking”, which is the work that really matters.
- It creates perspective. For our mind, every thought appears urgent. But by writing thoughts down, we are now able to simply look at them more objectively. We can figure out if we truly need to act or can simply let them be.
Here's how it works
Step 1: Prepare
Get your physical notebook and pen or open your trusted notes app. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes (5 minutes is good, 10 minutes would be great).
Step 2: Capture
Start writing and keep on writing what is going on in your mind. Write down your thoughts as they occur to you. The idea is to get into a flow of writing until the timer rings.
Step 3: Sort
There are three categories of thought that might come out of this thought capture exercise:
- Idea → transfer the idea where you usually capture your ideas
- Action → capture it on your todo list
- Challenge → address it now or, if it’s important but not urgent: capture it on your todo list to address at a later time