My mind-calming tactic

My mind is a storm © Elon Musk

So lately, I’ve been experimenting with a new thought decluttering technique, I call inboxing. Here’s the gist:

• Dump everything as bullet points into a single file named inbox.md
• Intermittently, dispatch the file content to the individual project inboxes.
• ?
• Profit

My experience so far

I believe if we were to dissect a human brain as a computer, we would find an extremely powerful and efficient processing unit with complexity beyond our comprehension and 2 KB of RAM. So it’s vital to save a good thought before it gets “garbage collected”. And that’s what I’m trying to achieve with the practice.

I spend almost all my time with my laptop and I’m not really happy about it. Hence, I was inclined to try pen and paper for the inbox. But it seems that I’m able to forget what I just thought of while I’m writing. I guess I just think faster than I write. Not than I type, though. Plus, as I said, I’m at my laptop all the time, so the inbox is just a few clicks away. So, good old analog world — maybe next time.

The first time I tried filling the inbox it grew to more than 200 lines. So I had many doubts about storing it all in just one file. I felt like that would be a long tedious task to clean this up. But it seems to turn out fine. Nowadays daily growth hardly reaches 100 lines. Maintainance doesn’t take too long either. Thanks to the tree-like structure of bullet points I can extract them block-by-block instead of line-by-line. Which, of course, decreases the required time dramatically.

Conclusion

I still have a lot to discover about the technique. But I think I’m up to a good start. It helps me to put my overwhelmed mind in a little bit more structured state from day one. And I hope someday I can share with you not just the first two steps, but a complete solution. All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.