Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 21 seconds.

TODAY’S IDEA: Your external brain

— From a mash-up of two books: Less Doing, More Living: Make Everything in Life Easier by Ari Meisel, and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

“Using your memory to store everything is stressful and unreliable,” says Ari Meisel, productivity guru, in his book Less Doing, More Living. He points out, rightly, that trying to hold all thoughts in our head is inefficient. “The problem with trying to remember everything is that in doing so, you run out of space in your head to actually think about the task at hand. What’s worse, it doesn’t always work.”

How many times have we made an effort to remember something and we still forgot? I’m so guilty of this: I know I tied that string around my finger to remember something, and later I couldn’t remember what that something was… I rest my case.

Enter the external brain. “It stores everything reliably, offers instant access, and frees your mind for more interesting work,” says Meisel.

So, where do I line up to get one of these external brains??!

We all have it at our disposal and it’s more low-tech than you can imagine: “The heart [mind?] of the external brain is note-taking. If an idea is in your head, get it out… we have to create idea flow for good ideas to come out… When you let your ideas flow freely, you get more ideas, and that leads to more good ideas.”

You’ve heard me quote Seth Godin before as saying, “You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.” This is exactly how we make that happen. Meisel says the same thing: “Not all ideas are good—out of ten ideas, you may have eight that are bad or irrelevant. But even bad ideas can lead to good ideas. You want to get them out of your head not only because they may be blocking a good idea from coming out, but also because they may come together with some of your other ideas to make a good idea.”

Meisel suggests finding a great tool or set of tools that enable you to capture the info and ideas outside of your head. His favorite app is Evernote. And if you are like most of us who get awesome ideas in the shower, he recommends AquaNotes (water-proof notepad).

On the other hand, in his bestselling book Getting Things Done, productivity guru David Allen, suggests—even for the most high-tech oriented among us—a stack of plain paper to capture each thought in its own sheet or card. Allen recommends:

Write out each thought, each idea, each project or thing that has your attention, on a separate sheet of paper. You could make one long list on a pad, or in some digital application, but… there is a discipline required to initially to stay focused on one item at a time as you process it. So giving each thought its own placeholder, as trivial as it might seem, makes it that much easier.
Go for quantity. It’s much better to overdo this process than to risk missing something. You can toss the junk later. Your first idea may be “Implement global climate change,” and then you’ll think, “I need cat food!” Grab them all. Don’t be surprised if you discover you’ve created quite a stack of paper during this procedure.

According to Allen, “It will probably take you between twenty minutes and an hour to clear your head onto separate notes.” And as you go through this exercise, “You’ll find that things will tend to occur to you in somewhat random fashion—little things, big things, personal things, professional things, in no particular order.” To help you clear your head, Allen has put together a wonderful Incompletion Triggers List that you can review to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything. Also, you can listen to this podcast where Allen guides you through what he calls a mind sweep session to put down, in paper, what is now occupying space in your head.

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen

Create your external brain and get those ideas flowing!

ACTION

TODAY: Take some time to figure out the “external brain” system that will work best for you, and then go through David Allen’s list or mind sweeping exercise to get everything out of your mind.

FUTURE: Once you have created a stack of notes, start prioritizing and processing each one based on your goals. You’ll likely see that some are not all that important, and some others become great ideas that you definitely want to act upon. What is the next action that you need to take? Determine it and take said action (it may take a while to get through all, but keep pushing through). It’s important to take this step because if you don’t do anything, the items from the list “will creep back into your consciousness, since your mind would know you weren’t dealing with [them],” says Allen. If there is no next action to take, then he suggests, trash the item, incubate it, or file it as reference material. That will be your action and your mind will now be unstuck and free to produce more ideas.

Please share the external brain with someone else! Email, Facebook or Twitter.