

The Magic of the Brain Dump - combiclickwise
http://blog.attendmind.com/2013/05/the-magic-of-brain-dump.html

======
espeed
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...](http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-sleep-without-my-mind-thinking-of-
a-million-things/answer/James-Thornton)) 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
And were any of the stream of thoughts useful, or was it just an exercise to
calm an overactive mind?

~~~
espeed
Yes, most were related to my startup.

------
tompixel
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.

------
winter_blue
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.?)

~~~
johnchristopher
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 ?

------
Auguste
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.

------
jabbernotty
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.

~~~
espeed
You can email into your Evernote account:

[http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/04/20/quick-tip-friday-
em...](http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/04/20/quick-tip-friday-emailing-
into-your-evernote-account/)

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.

~~~
jabbernotty
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.

~~~
ims
Evernote and Linux user here. Their web app is quite good, and their Android
and iOS apps are fantastic. Having also messed around with their native app on
Windows, I didn't feel like I was missing too much since the whole point is
really the content of the notes.

For what it's worth, there are a couple clones of the native app for Linux
including Everpad and Nevernote. Haven't tried them because the web app does
everything that seems necessary for me.

------
elliott34
I like workflowy. Low friction to use

~~~
combiclickwise
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.

