Student life is busy, and the student brain becomes crowded: you need to remember the school work such as assignments, tests, due dates, study sessions that will get you good grades, and all the menial tasks such as eating and sleeping that will keep you alive. It’s hard to stay focused. It’s even harder to keep ideas and reminders and distractions from popping into your head as you’re trying to work through a task. A daily mind dump can help you to stay on track without losing the reminders and potential creativity of those poorly timed ideas.
Here’s how to do it:
The real value of the mind dump is that it allows you to get rid of free-floating ideas, and the anxiety that comes with the pressure to remember them all. If you know that the information is somewhere, then you won’t stress to remember it all. If the information is somewhere and you have a concrete plan to deal with it, then you’ll trust yourself to use the information, and get everything done. You’ll free up untold amounts of mental space, and you’ll shed anxiety as you do it.
Here’s how to do it:
- Choose a notebook. Any notebook will do. You can even use the back of your planner if you have extra space. You can either take the notebook with you while you’re on the go during the day, or you can leave it in a regular space.
- Choose a regular time. Some people mind-dump daily, and some choose one time each week to write down everything. Some people even write down all concerns, worries, new ideas all the time, as they go. Find what works for you.
- Dump all free floating ideas. Write down everything that you’ve been trying to keep from forgetting. This could be due dates, ideas for problem sets, etc. Commit it all to paper so that you don’t have to waste precious mental space lugging the ideas around with you. If they’re written down somewhere, you will remember them.
- Sort the ideas. Find a regular time to go through the ideas, and deal with them properly. Write down all due dates and plans in your scheduler. Write down ideas for your math problem set in your math notebook. Write down questions for your chemistry tutorial in your chemistry binder. Make sure that all the concerns, worries and ideas are properly sorted.
- Cross them out as they’re done. As you’ve dealt with the concerns, written down the due dates, asked the questions, tried the ideas, cross them out in your mind dump journal so that you know that they’ve been dealt with. Move on to the next flurry of ideas.
The real value of the mind dump is that it allows you to get rid of free-floating ideas, and the anxiety that comes with the pressure to remember them all. If you know that the information is somewhere, then you won’t stress to remember it all. If the information is somewhere and you have a concrete plan to deal with it, then you’ll trust yourself to use the information, and get everything done. You’ll free up untold amounts of mental space, and you’ll shed anxiety as you do it.
