Brain Dump

The dump has two halves and both are needed. Writing everything down feels good on its own, but a long unsorted list is another thing to carry. The decision pass is what turns it into something you can put down.

1. Set the five minutes and write one thought per line. Fragments are fine. Repeats are fine. Include the things you already decided not to do, because those take up space too.
2. When you run out, wait. The last thirty seconds usually produce the two lines you were actually avoiding.
3. Go into triage and give each line one of five answers. Do not edit the wording, do not plan the work, and do not go back.
4. Use schedule with a real date rather than someday when there is a deadline. Someday is for things you might want later, not for things you are quietly late on.
5. Delete generously. A line you will never act on and do not need to keep is the cheapest thing here to get rid of.

Why the writing helps

Masicampo and Baumeister found in 2011 that unfinished goals intrude on unrelated thinking, and that the intrusion goes away when you make a specific plan for the goal, even though the goal itself is still unfinished. The interference comes from the open loop, not from the work. That is why the triage step matters more than the list: a line that has been given a place stops asking for attention, and a line sitting in an unsorted pile does not.

An honest note

The value here is the forced one-pass decision, not the list itself. If you triage into a task list you never look at again, you have moved the pile rather than cleared it. The weekly review in Get It Done is what keeps the destinations honest, and without something like it the someday bucket quietly becomes a graveyard.

Four of the five answers write a task; the fifth writes nothing. Do now files the line under next actions with no date on it. Schedule files it under scheduled and attaches whatever is in the date field, which starts on today and then stays wherever you left it for the lines that follow, so set it before you press the button rather than after. Someday and Reference file it under the bucket of the same name. Delete puts the line nowhere at all: it shows struck through in the summary and disappears for good when you start the next dump.

A kept line becomes a task whose title is the line exactly as you typed it, created today, at medium priority, with no project, no tags and no session estimate. That is deliberate. Setting any of those during triage would turn a two second decision into planning, which is the thing this step exists to prevent, and all of it is one click away in the task manager afterwards.

Lines are split on the line breaks, trimmed, and blanks dropped. Nothing is merged, so two lines that say roughly the same thing become two tasks and you delete one later. Writing the same worry down twice is common in a five minute dump and is not worth slowing down for.

Say the five minutes leave you with twenty-two lines. Triage goes quickly once you stop deliberating: six to do now, three given dates, five to someday, two to reference and six deleted. The summary screen shows those five counts side by side, your task list has gained sixteen items, and the dump text is gone.

Read the counts before you leave. Six deletions out of twenty-two is a healthy pass. One or none usually means you are keeping things out of guilt rather than intent, and a do now column with fifteen lines in it is a list that will be ignored by Wednesday, because next actions only works when its contents are things you would genuinely pick up today.

The whole flow survives a reload. The text, the queue, the decisions already made and which of the three steps you are on are all held in this browser, so a closed lid or an accidental refresh drops you back on the same line rather than at the beginning. That also means the summary sits there until you press New brain dump or Start over, which is long enough to copy anything out of it that you want elsewhere.