A 25-minute brain dump
Empty your head onto paper, decide the next step for each thing, and pick the three that matter tomorrow.
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Time: 25 minutes
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Clear all the checkmarks?
Before you start · 2 minutes
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Paper works best: no notifications, and you can see everything at once.
Dump everything · 10 minutes
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Big or small, urgent or not: if you’re thinking about it, it goes on the page.
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You don’t have to solve them now. Just get them out of your head and onto the page.
Decide · 8 minutes
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They’re not for now: reread them in a few weeks.
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You’ll knock them all out as soon as you finish.
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Not “dentist,” but “call the dentist to book a cleaning.”
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Fake deadlines turn into noise: you skip them, and then you skip the real ones too.
Choose · 5 minutes
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“Tomorrow at 9, at my desk, I’ll call the dentist.” A plan this specific helps you follow through and stop dwelling on it.
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On your phone or in a notebook, but just one.
When the timer goes off
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Once a week is usually enough to keep your head clear.
Clear head
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Good to know
- The point isn’t to do everything: it’s to see everything and choose. What stays on the list is safe, not a failure.
- The specific plan (when, where, what) isn’t fussiness: in studies, deciding when and how you’ll do something makes you more likely to do it, and quiets the nagging thoughts about unfinished tasks.
- Doing it in the evening can help you switch off: in a 2018 sleep-lab study, people who spent 5 minutes writing a to-do list for the next few days fell asleep about 9 minutes faster, on average, than people who wrote about tasks they’d already finished.
Frequently asked questions
Paper or phone?
For the dump, paper: you see it all at a glance and nothing pings you. For the final list, use whatever you actually check every day, phone or notebook.
What if I don’t finish writing in 10 minutes?
That’s fine: when the timer goes off, move on to deciding. Whatever you missed will come back to you, and you can add it to the list then.
How often should I do this?
Once a week, plus any time you feel overloaded. The first one takes the longest; after that it’s faster, because your list is already in order.
Next step
Sources
- Masicampo & Baumeister (2011), plan making and unfulfilled goals — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Scullin et al. (2018), bedtime writing: to-do lists and falling asleep — Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Gollwitzer (1999), implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans — American Psychologist
If worries keep you up at night or have weighed on you for weeks, talk to your doctor or a mental health professional.