Source: hellolittlehouse.com
A long list of to-dos that travels into our heads is not something that we want to have. When we have a lot of things to remember, it can be overwhelming, mental energy consuming and it can drastically decrease our ability to concentrate on the tasks at hand. This alone should be as a suffice factor to convince us that we should do something that can help in this matter.
Brain dumping means writing down all the things that come to your mind, everything that is grabbing your attention. I have already written about the importance of writing, and how it can help you by having the potential to be as an external brain for you, but today this article mentions a particular approach of using writing as a means of achieving a less stressful state and a colder head.
There might be some personal development gurus that can promote some types of procedures with a long list of steps that you should follow to perform a complete cycle of brain dump to get the most of the results. However, I just like to introduce you to this idea, if you have not had the chance to stumble upon it until now, or simply remind you about it, but I also think that there are a few critical milestones that you should accomplish.
All you have to do is take a piece of paper, or write in Evernote, Microsoft Word etc. and then start to write down all the things that come to your mind, so that there is nothing left that is stressing you, or that you think is important. After you have done that, then you should go through all the things that you have just written and categorize them into: actionable and nonactionable items. After that, you need to prioritize your tasks from the actionable list in order of importance and urgency and put them into your schedule according to the filters that you used. Then, decide what you need to do with the nonactionable items: Whether you should save that list somewhere so that you do not completely forget about them, or simply throw it away, if it does not make any difference.
This routine would be ideal to be used once a week, or at least during the times when you feel overwhelmed and stressed out with a lot of things that have been piling up. Your head will be without a lot of unimportant junk that have been simply distracting you from the real important tasks that deserve our attention. This technique despite improving your concentration, can also help you get into the mood of studying before your lectures.
