The Morning Ritual: The 20 Minute Brain Dump

I have been doing this for the last couple of weeks and it has been helping immensely with my concentration and focus. Before I do anything at work in the morning I do a 20 minute brain dump. This lets me get out anything that I need to do out of my head and into my organizational tool.

I do the following:

• Go through my open tasks for the week and see if anything is complete or if there is something I can make progress on. What I choose to work on is based on the energy I have available to me for the day. If I don’t have energy which requires me to be social then I choose to work on things which require little contact.
• Go through my open tickets at work and figure out which ones I will tackle that day. This is much more specific in the sense I tend to figure out who I need to talk to and what the milestones I have to do to get myself from A to B.
• Go through my entire email inbox and make tasks for anything that needs to be done or followed up on. I’ve been using Google Inbox for personal mail and Mailbox for work mail. The nice thing is I can just snooze emails that are not immediately important to me. I can archive emails that are not really actionable and email away things that I have which are of importance.

Those things have helped me tremendously in terms of focus and making sure I don’t have anything in my head that doesn’t need to be there. There are enough things to remember so I’ve put all my trust in my organization system.