The Magic of the Brain Dump

http://blog.attendmind.com/2013/05/the-magic-of-brain-dump.html

by combiclickwise • 13 years ago

27 15 13 years ago

blog.attendmind.com

espeed3• 13 years ago

This little hack works.

Until a couple years ago I often had trouble falling asleep at night because I always had to ride the rapid stream of thoughts rushing through my head. One night the stream went meta, and I recognized it needed an outlet.

So as an experiment, I bought a stack of legal pads and put them next to my bed. Then over several weeks, I wrote down every thought that came to mind and followed every path, no matter how long it took.

The first few rounds took hours -- I'd usually fall asleep with the pad in hand, and the pads were piling up so I had to go get more -- but gradually things subsided. After several weeks and a pile of legal pads, the waters quieted down and I was able to sleep at night. The spillway worked.

Right about the time I completed this experiment, someone serendipitously asked on Quora, "How can I sleep without my mind thinking of a million things?". Just now when I went back to reference the URL (http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-sleep-without-my-mind-thinkin...) I was reminded of the quote by Charlotte Brontë -- "A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow".

Now I use Evernote as my thought outlet throughout the day, and this magical little hack continues to work - no more racing waters, no more restless pillows.

porker• 13 years ago

And were any of the stream of thoughts useful, or was it just an exercise to calm an overactive mind?

espeed3• 13 years ago

Yes, most were related to my startup.

winter_blue• 13 years ago

This is an excellent piece. I began doing this, rather subconsciously after being overwhelmed by carrying too many things in my head at the same time.

A long time I had the belief that "smart people don't need to jote down things to remember -- they can hold it all in their head - they're smart :)" And hey, I'm smart -- so I'm going to do the same. Needless to say, it was a very foolish things to believe in.

I would say though, reminding myself to take the little effort needed to write something down, is important. Often time I am too lazy to even press Ctrl+Alt and switch to my text editor and write down what thoughts I as having. Reminding myself to do this, and not carry around various TODOs and other such baggage than slows down my general thinking abilities, is crucial.

Now a question to HNers: I've run into trouble organizing the various "brain dumps" (basically, a collection of text files). I sometimes forget about them, and never get back to them. How do you manage this issue? (ie. how do you organize your brain dumps and make sure things are done, etc.?)

combiclickwise2• 13 years ago

Thanks.

I use Remember the milk for organizing the list from the brain dump. I also have used evernote. Both are pretty good. They also allow you to take it beyond brain dumps. Remember the milk, has reminders (sms, email) which is very useful.

johnchristopher• 13 years ago

I am going to be "that guy" but let me quote something from that wired article about Xanadu and Ted Nelson I read every few years:

> [...] Jellinghaus also began to question whether a hypertext revolution required the perfect preservation of all knowledge. He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream - "How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that is infinitely scalable?" - but he suspected that human society might not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything. "Maybe most things that people do shouldn't be remembered," Jellinghaus says. "Maybe forgetting is good."

Regarding your implementation problem regarding things that must be done: why not simply grep txt files and decide on a simple set of symbol (eg: X,*,1,etc.) to put in front of lines that have to be processed later on ?

Revisit those txt files later for a good read and see what comes out ?

padraigm• 13 years ago

I use org-mode, with links between files as necessary and some helper functions to quickly create new files in an organized manner with a single key combination. That particular set of org-mode files looks a lot like a wiki, and I can use the agenda view to quickly see all to-do items without having to necessarily hunt through all of the various files for them.

Auguste• 13 years ago

I had this same problem for years. 18 months ago, I started carrying around a notepad (Field Notes) and clicky pen everywhere to make sure I could get everything down, and it's made a huge difference.

At the end of every day, I process the last day's worth of notes. Appointments/meetings go onto my calendar, tasks go into TeuxDeux, and cash expenses go into YNAB.

elliott34• 13 years ago

I like workflowy. Low friction to use

combiclickwise2• 13 years ago

I love it too. I love the design and how simple it is.

Some of my stuff is in workflowy as well. I use it as an intermediary app for select projects.

tompixel• 13 years ago

I'd like to give major props to http://750words.com/

Simple enough, write 750 words a day. But what gets me going is the depth of analytics that just gets thrown in as a bonus after you finish each entry. Emotional state, preoccupations, etc. tracked through time.

You'll have an idea of it if you try and write one.

jabbernotty2• 13 years ago

I often have thoughts that I want to write down, while I am at work. Because I am at work (not at home) I often don't write them down.

Because of that I'm thinking of developing a 'brain dump' service, that you can send an email to. You would host it on your own device. The service will read it's inbox and add messages from authorized senders to a plain-text repository, and offer the most simple things like login, listing and search functionality.

espeed3• 13 years ago

You can email into your Evernote account:

http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/04/20/quick-tip-friday-em...

Or if you don't like Evernote, you could use Zapier (https://zapier.com/) to email into almost any other Web service with an API.

jabbernotty2• 13 years ago

Ah, thanks, I didn't know that about Evernote. I've not used Evernote myself because I tend to use Linux, but I'm definitely going to try it with Wine.

The Magic of the Brain Dump

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