Doing a periodic mindsweep is an essential exercise for effective time management.
There was a time when I thought doing a mindsweep was something one should do every couple of months. Now I realize that it should be done anytime you feel like a lot of stuff is “swimming around” inside your head. For me, the right frequency for doing this is probably weekly. With my ADD-like symptoms, my mind is going 100 miles an hour when I am not immersed in an activity. New ideas are constantly added and evaluated, sometimes relegated to my subconscious but always cluttering my mental RAM.
What amazes me is how significant some of the items are that surface when I do a mindsweep. For example, yesterday I sat down with a legal pad and wrote down what came to mind, and several items were significant. I don’t want to get too personal, but to show you what I mean, here are a few of the items:
- Spending far too much time tweaking this blog (aesthetics and the like) and too little time on strategic thinking.
- There is so much in the world that needs to be fixed (poverty, abuse, education, …). Where do I fit in? What can I and what should I do about these problems?
That’s just a couple of the major items, and there were a half-dozen in all.
I suspect the lack of smaller items is due to the fact that, when I think of an action I must take (charge phone) or an idea (post blog on mindsweeping), I either do it or jot it down, typically on a 3×5 card … I keep a stack near me. Depending on the item, it sometimes gets added to my planning system; in other cases, it remains on a 3×5 card until completed.
The key is: when these items are written down, I can address them. When they were just swimming around in my head, nothing was being done about them.
Do you do a regular mindsweep? Do you have any tips to share on how to get the thoughts to flow from your mind to paper … do you do anything to stimulate the flow? Any other related comments?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Agreed. In addition to the purely functional aspects (ie: forgetting some bit of important data) I also really dislike that constant feeling of trying to keep so many plates spinning, as it were. The whole paradigm is very computer-like - you have limited mental resources (RAM). Better to offload information you don’t need right now to your index cards (hard drive) where it can be safely stored until you need it. That’s one part of the GTD worldview that I really like - it’s a great feeling to file something away and forget about it, knowing that it will reappear automatically, right when you need it.
Thanks capo. The part about keeping the mind clean is one of the best parts of GTD: “get the thoughts and actions recorded and don’t worry about them.” It’s amazing, though, how much stuff can still pile up in one’s head, including big stuff. That’s why I really like a mindsweep, which again is a big emphasis of GTD.