Tools for Thought

What GTD calls a “mind sweep” gives you permission to capture whatever’s on your mind without having to simultaneously make a decision about it. That’s a lot different than writing a to do list, where some things are clearly defined actions, some are goals and others are basically one-word notes.

Unlike a to do list, the only purpose of a mind sweep is to empty mental RAM. You don’t have to spell out a goal or an action step. A mind sweep might look like this:

• Voter registration
• Groceries
• Email Doug
• Process T&E receipts
• Asset reallocation

We keep going with this list until there’s nothing else consuming our attention. Mind sweeps are typically done after in-basket processing or during a weekly review, but they can be done any time. I’ll do a mind sweep right before working on anything that requires concentration. Some people do one before going to sleep.

Notice that only one of the items in the above list, “Process T&E receipts,” is a sufficiently granular next action. “Email Doug” almost qualifies, but leaves the objective of the email unstated.

Depending on who wrote it, “Voter registration” might get processed into the project, “Register to vote,” with the next action, “Look up voter registration forms.” For someone else, the objective might be confirming her registration if she hasn’t already received her sample ballot. So she would would put down “Look up voter registration confirmation process.” “Asset reallocation” might represent a research project to find out if the cost of shift one’s investments would be greater than the rate of their current decline.

Transforming stuff

In GTD there are two broad placeholders for anything that we record:

• Collection
• Organization

Since most people equate task management systems with “getting organized,” the organization component gets the lion’s share of attention. That’s not surprising, since it’s also the part with the most operational detail: lists, calendars, filing systems and software. You process what you collect into your organization.

Collection can involve several buckets: a notepad, an in-basket, an email inbox, voice mail and a physical mailbox. But for the moment I only want to address the notepad (which for some people might mean a text editor). The inability to capture thoughts rapidly can be a primary bottleneck to the entire GTD process. Excessively deliberating on how or where to write some things down breeds an unconscious resistance to writing anything down.

When I started GTD, I captured everything on my Treo 600. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was actually trying to capture and process at the same time. This became dramatically clear when I purchased a notetaker wallet — a regular-size wallet containing a small retractable pen and notepad. The first thing I noticed was how much more I collected — and how much I wasn’t collecting before –two reasons.

• Physically, it was faster and more fluid to write notes on paper than enter them directly into the Treo’s QWERTY keyboard. Jotting down notes with pen and paper was also a less self-conscious process around others than whipping out a gadget.
• Since the Treo’s PDA function is inherently a list manager, I felt compelled to locate the appropriate list for capturing each thought, so that before I could type something in, I would have to think about whether it was a project, next action or appointment. Sometimes the category was self-evident, but for captures that involved even slightly more thinking downstream, I tended to leave them in my head — something I didn’t notice before switching to the notetaker wallet.

Collecting allows you to write stuff down without the overhead of thinking about what to do with it. You see a book discussed on Oprah. You haven’t decided whether or not you want to read it. You just know that the book is still on your mind since Oprah mentioned it. It doesn’t seem important enough to commit to reading, but it was still interesting enough to keep thinking about.

Instead of spending further cycles of attention on it, just write down the title. Once you have a physical representation of the thought in front of you, it suddenly becomes easier to think about, for the same reason that doing arithmetic on paper is easier than dead reckoning — mental effort is no longer divided between thinking and working memory. Naturally, if you did know you were going to read the book, it’s easier to skip the collection process and just make a next action out of purchasing the book. Sometimes, just finally seeing the item in front of you is enough to know that it’s not worth acting on or thinking about anymore.

As long as what you’ve written down on your mind sweep isn’t crossed out, you know that there’s still processing that needs to be done on it. Looking at someone’s to do list on Flickr, I see a task that only says “Tape deck,” which doesn’t indicate what to do about it. If “tape deck” were an open item on a mind sweep list, it would be clear that it needed more processing to make it actionable. Once we put “Donate tape deck to Goodwill” on our @Errands list, there’s nothing more to think about; we just have to do the action. But now that it’s processed, we can cross “tape deck” off the mind sweep list.

Whenever you find yourself unusually preoccupied, taking a minute or two to do a mind sweep can be a much more effective way to reflect on what has your attention then purely mental introspection.