Arjan Zuid­hof, 25 Janu­ary 2012.

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Arjan Zuid­hof 2012, ‘Clear Your Head’, hypotheticorp.org, web­log post, accessed 22 Feb­ru­ary 2012, <http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/miscellaneous/clearhead/>.

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Arjan Zuid­hof, (2012, Janu­ary 25). Clear Your Head [blog post]. Retrieved from http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/miscellaneous/clearhead/

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Arjan Zuid­hof. “Clear Your Head” hypotheticorp.org n.p., 25 Jan. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2012

Arjan Zuid­hof is a guest author and effi­ciency coach based in the Netherlands.

Pre­par­a­tion:

1. Have pen­cil and paper ready.
2. Make sure you’re in a quiet place without danger to be dis­turbed before read­ing on.

This is a simple yet power­ful way to get all those plans and ideas that are buzz­ing around in your brain all day long under con­trol. These thoughts are con­stantly dis­tract­ing you, pre­vent­ing you from mak­ing short– and long-term plans.

Truth is: they can’t help it, it’s you that haven’t decided any­thing about them that will make them keep nag­ging you. What you need is a reli­able external sys­tem to get them out of your head.

One of these com­pletely reli­able sys­tems is David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done (GTD) sys­tem. But it takes at least a month to read the book and start mak­ing this method our own. We don’t have that long right now.

There a huge issue with all those loose ends circ­ling around both in your head and head­ing your dir­ec­tion from the out­side world. You will be reminded about the stu­pid­est things at the least expec­ted moment. Even worse: don’t do any­thing about them, and they will finally just dis­ap­pear. Too bad, because while most ideas have no future value, some of them are real gems. One of them might even change the world. So make sure you do some­thing with those gems! How? Read on …

Start Writ­ing

Grab that pen and paper that have so patiently been wait­ing next to you. Dur­ing the next ten minutes you will start to write down lit­er­ally everything that’s in your head. This will range from small actions that need imme­di­ate atten­tion up to big future pro­jects whose impact you can­not yet even fathom. It doesn’t mat­ter what it is, once it’s writ­ten down it will be out of your head. Things you might encounter:

1. Clean­ing up the backyard
2. Find a good school for my kid
3. Improve my jobskills
4. Learn how to use Prezi instead of Power­point for presentations
5. Write an ebook about … (fill in your specialty)
6. Update your daily administration
7. Empty your e-mail inbox
8. Pre­pare present­a­tion for quarterly meet­ing next week
9. Get XYZ pro­ject back on track with Isaac and Charlie
10. And so on, and so on.

Don’t spend any time think­ing about those weird things you’re jot­ting down. What you’re going to do with them later is irrel­ev­ant now. By the way, did you notice that most things on the list above — apart from items 6 and 7 — are big­ger things than just 1 action? In GTD-speak they’re called pro­jects, “all desired out­comes that take more than one action to com­plete” or goals. Goals are good, but can not be acted on imme­di­ately. They need to be made more spe­cific, and nor­mally fol­low the route from defin­ing pro­jects first and actions later.

Now start writ­ing. Take your time and keep writ­ing, until your head is com­pletely empty. If ten minutes of frantic writ­ing are not enough, hold on. Later you’ll thank your­self! OK, there we go, I’m wait­ing for you …

Ready? When everything went accord­ing to plan, you now have an impress­ive list in front of you. Full of action­able items, pro­jects and the more fuzzy goals. With less than 30 points you either have an extremely laid­back life or cheated. In the lat­ter case: maybe write a little more? Until the num­ber approaches 50 or even 100 you’re prob­ably not done yet. This only works if your head is really clear of every loose end — you will know when you’re done.

What you have achieved now is that everything is in a trus­ted sys­tem out­side your head. Now it comes down to the most import­ant thing: really doing some­thing with this inform­a­tion. First look at things that can be done in one step: your actions. These go on an action list, to be done the moment you are ready for them. The rest of your items are either pro­jects or goals. Put them on two sep­ar­ate lists, and keep them current..In the future, these lists make it easier for you to focus on what’s requir­ing your atten­tion now (pro­jects) and to check whether your actions are in line with where you’re head­ing in life and work.

Bonus Tip

Over­whelmed by a huge pro­ject list? Do not shoot the mes­sen­ger  ;-) this is all your stuff. Who says you are required to com­plete the entire list? Take a crit­ical look at the pro­jects that don’t give energy and that you can elim­in­ate without risk of get­ting in trouble. Be hon­est, there’s more to be deleted than you think. You are your own judge.

A waste of time, all this list­mak­ing? On the con­trary! You have found a way to get those loose ends out of your head. This will give a tre­mend­ous amount of energy and focus. From now on you’re doing only things that are import­ant to YOU. It’s hard to come up with a bet­ter timesaver than that, I’d say.

Good luck clear­ing your head. Did it work? Share your exper­i­ences below.