Today’s article is the first in a series of three which comprise a Micro-Guide
called “The Clarity Manual”. You’ll get the remainder of the series over
the next three weeks. Downloadable PDF and Audio versions will be available at
the beginning of April on nir.media.

As you open up this article, my guess is you could be feeling like you’re carrying a lot.

Except, I’d be surprised if you were carrying as much as this:

That’s a shot of the world’s biggest dump truck – the BelAZ75710. And while you
might look at that and think to yourself “I see there are 8 tires and a good
sized pile of rock there… but it doesn’t look THAT big…”

Well, you’d be wrong. The BelAZ75710 is larger than most buildings and can
carry 500 metric tons of quarry rock/dirt at one time. No big deal, that’s
about the weight of two to three full sized blue whales.

Though you may not be carrying that much weight, I certainly imagine it could feel like you are. Unlike massive dump trucks, our brains weren’t made to handle all of that weight.

So, within this first section of our mini-guide to attaining clarity and getting out from under overwhelm, we’re going to begin to offload. We’ll do this through a process called a “Brain Dump” – that is, getting all the thoughts in your head out of your head and captured in such a way where you can organize them. After that, we’ll start getting clarity on what to actually do with all of the things you’ve written down.

As creatives, we get LOTS of ideas jumping into our heads daily and often
have a lot of responsibilities.
A hallmark of creative people is loathing structure and being “put into boxes”. I’m generalizing, but usually creatives don’t love making backlogs, to-do lists, task tracking, project scoping, budgeting time/money/energy, etc.

Instead, lots of us try and keep everything in our heads or on sticky notes (ah, the sticky note cult – you know who you are!). Once that fails, we’ll try and turn to apps and planners for structure. Even then, those things will fail us if we (inevitably) don’t keep up with the system.

What I love to advocate is building your own organizational system. While we don’t have the space to cover all aspects of that here, we can absolutely tackle the first part – just getting everything in your head out of your head.

Once you’ve completed a brain dump, you’ll walk away feeling one of two things – either super relieved because it’s all out of your head, or still overwhelmed because now you see everything that’s been in your head.

Rest assured, by the end of this micro-guide your heart rate and blood pressure will have dropped considerably. But, we’ve got to go through the process even if there’s some short term stress.

We begin a Brain Dump by figuring out our “capture” device.
I honestly prefer going analog and using pen and paper for this, but it’s not a requirement. For me personally, getting away from digital devices as much as possible can aid in the stress relief and mental clarity process.

I get it, though – sometimes that’s not possible or you just really prefer digital notetaking tools. All that’s absolutely necessary is to have a place you can write. A notes app on your phone, a document on your computer, or a piece of paper are all equally useful.

Next, we need to block off an initial chunk of time. Usually 10-30 minutes is acceptable to start this exercise and you’ll need to turn your devices off or set them on ‘do not disturb’, get away from meetings, and tell anyone around you not to bother you.

Once you’re in the scary place with yourself and your thoughts for that chunk of time, pull out your capture device and jot down in bullet point form everything that comes to your mind that you need to do and that you want to do. There’s no proper format to this – just dump it all into a massive awful pile just like that giant dump truck would.

What this tends to look like is an initial blast of “top of mind” bullets,
followed by short bursts as you remember things (or get distracted and remember
things). Listing everything you need to be doing is obviously good for
immediate organization – but also listing future goals (yes, write down that
“I’ve been dreaming of taking a vacation in Tahiti forever” idea) is also
necessary. The point here is to get literally everything out of your mind and onto written down.

Once you feel like you’ve exhausted what’s in your mind, the initial dump is
done. Don’t do anything else with it other than keep it accessible and go about
your day. For the next 24 hours or so, your brain will remember things you left
off the list and you’ll exclaim “OH!” – which is a cue to pull out your list and write things down. If those flashes of inspiration trigger other ideas, write those down too. Keep absolutely nothing in your mind and don’t start working on any of your list until at least 24 hours later.

Now you have everything written down… but what do you DO with it?
The first thing that you with your large list is to separate it into two simple, distinct areas – the things you will work on immediately, and the things that will wait until later.

It’s at this separation that you’re going to be tempted to add too many things to the “immediate” list. In reality, your “immediate” list will likely be 10% or less of everything you’ve written down. If it’s significantly large and overwhelming, then you’ve overloaded yourself with short-term immediate things. You may need to get through some of those to get to some normalcy.

The “I will work on this immediately” list should include the things you need to do at work or some within the next week or two – ie: it needs your fairly immediate attention. This may also include one goal that you intend to work on immediately that stretches into a longer term commitment.

The “I’ll get to this later” list will include all of the other good, fun, exciting, overwhelming, frustrating, or otherwise commitments and responsibilities that you’re not going to take care of in short fashion. If you’ve never built a “bucket list” before, well, welcome – you just made a form of one with this list. If this list looks overwhelmingly huge, then you’ve done the exercise correctly. If you fall into an existential crisis that you’ll never get it all done in your lifetime – you’re still doing it right. Eventually you’ll realize that many things will drop off this list with time, and once you get clarity and focus you’ll actually get through much of it a lot faster than you think!

Once you’ve finished that initial organization, I like to categorize all the work and goals. While this isn’t a necessary step – it helps you mentally break huge lists down into “chunks” that are easier to manage mentally and emotionally. There’s no set structure for this but some of my categories look like – “Physical Drive (Fitness)”, “Family Life/Legacy”, “Personal Joys”, “Office Work”, etc. You can even make this fun and give your categories crazy names like “World Domination” and “Adonis Routine” if you want!

There’s no “getting this right” – it’s all dependent on how you work best, and
how it’s most fun for you. You can either look at this process as overwhelming,
or like the start of a fun puzzle where you’ve just dumped all the pieces on a
table and you’re categorizing by edges and colors. I highly suggest you do the latter and make it fun for yourself. So, go with your gut tendencies.

Now that you’ve gotten these bullets organized and you have a large pile of things to work on eventually and a small(er) pile of things to work on very soon – you’re about ready to move on to what we call “Laughably Small Tasks”.

But first, I know you may have a question like…

“So let me get this straight… this is supposed to DE-stress me?! I’m just
looking at all of this stuff and I’m EVEN MORE panicked now! What
gives?!”
Yep, yep – as I said before, this is absolutely what happens to some folks. It’s okay and understandable. Making big “organize your life” lists like this can be exhausting and overwhelming – especially if there’s a lot living in your head.

But, the idea here is we’ve now gotten all of those things you’ve been holding inside out onto paper or a device so you don’t have to think about them anymore. If you find that you’re still thinking about and obsessing over your list, you may still have some things to write down! If you’re feeling anxious about getting it all done, or done quickly, then take a breath and remember you were anxious and not getting a lot done with less stress before this. It’s a process, it’ll all work out.

We’ve gotten to the end of the Brain Dump – let’s review:

• The Brain Dump is useful because it gets all of our thoughts out of our head
  and written down.
• You Brain Dump successfully by scheduling time to do it, then walking away
  from it and writing down your thoughts over the course of 24 hours.
• Brain Dump contents is best utilized after you start categorizing it.

While it’s impressive how much a big dump truck like BelAZ75710 can
hold…
It’s not really ideal to operate your brain like a dump truck regularly – loading it up and dumping it all out. Let this be a process you use when you catch yourself in overwhelm, as a place to start getting back out from under the weight of it all.

Next, we’ll cover how to take this Brain Dump and make it even more clear and actionable using a system to create what I call “Laughably Small Tasks”

And lastly, we’ve added a bit more detail about Small Sci-Fi Weapons
on the site this week, including images as to what’s contained in the pack. If
you’ve got any questions, you can always reply directly to this mail!.