Photo by Martin Grincevschi on Unsplash

Your Mind Was Meant to Be a Factory (Not a Warehouse)

It’s important that you use your brain for task selection instead of using it for task storage.

Once I started to take the time to capture thoughts, tasks, and ideas that I had on paper or in a digital workspace, I began to rely less on my brain to remember those things.

Now I absolutely don’t trust my brain to remember those things.

When it does, it is a bonus but I use that recollection not to take action on the thing I just remembered but to figure out if I need to take action on it sooner than I had thought when I captured it in the first place.

Essentially, remembering things for me isn’t about recall anymore. It’s a trigger to show me what’s truly important to me.

The only way I was able to change the way I use my brain as a means for task selection instead of task storage was to create a method of capturing the things I needed to store elsewhere. I built one that works equally well on paper or in apps. I trust that framework after using it for several years.

Now my brain can do one of two things when it come to task selection:

1. Review my to do list and select tasks to do from there.
2. Recall something I’d captured and make sure it gets done sooner rather than later.