Introduction
Even with good organization and clear goals, real days are often chaotic.
Requests come from everywhere.
Ideas keep popping up.
And you also have personal obligations you really shouldn't forget.
The risk is not knowing where to store all of it, and letting these thoughts pile up into a kind of mental dark cloud.
And nothing is worse for focus, stress, and sleep.
The dark cloud and the Zeigarnik effect
To understand this dark cloud, we need to talk about the Zeigarnik effect.
Bluma Zeigarnik was a Russian psychologist from the early 20th century.
She observed that waiters remembered current orders very well... but quickly forgot the ones already served.
Conclusion: an unfinished task takes up much more space in our brain than a finished one.
And we all experience it daily.
Every unrecorded task stays open in your head, consumes mental energy, and prevents you from focusing on what truly matters.
Your brain isn't made to store.
It's made to think.
Why keeping everything in your head is a bad idea
When too many tasks remain unresolved in your mind:
- you stress for no reason
- you lose focus
- you forget important things
- you ruminate, sometimes even at night
Your brain works a bit like a computer's RAM.
When it's saturated, everything slows down.
That's why trying to "remember everything" is a terrible productivity strategy.
The solution: write everything down, without sorting
To clear that dark cloud, the rule is simple: every new task or idea must be written down immediately.
Without thinking.
Without sorting.
Without prioritizing.
This idea comes in particular from David Allen and his GTD method (Getting Things Done).
The core principle is clear: the brain is for generating ideas, not for storing them.
Sorting comes later, when you're calm, for example when you prioritize your tasks.
Where to write your tasks down
The medium doesn't matter, as long as it's ultra accessible.
Three options:
- paper (notebook, sheet, sticky note)
- phone
- computer
The only real rule is access speed.
The faster it is, the more you'll write down, and the less you'll keep in your head.
Some people use multiple mediums and consolidate everything once a day into their main to-do list.
Others write everything directly in the same place.
There isn't a good or a bad method.
There is only one rule: let nothing slip through the net.
Write your tasks clearly from the start
Writing a task isn't just scribbling a few vague words.
Example:
writing "vacation August" is better than nothing... but not enough.
A few days later, the context is gone.
A better version would be: "request vacation from Aug 3 to Aug 25".
The more precise you are when you capture the task, the easier you make your life when you handle it later.
Tasks waiting on someone else
There's one last category of thoughts that is especially intrusive:
things you're waiting on from other people.
A quote.
Feedback.
Approval.
If you don't write them down, they loop in your head.
A simple solution is creating a "follow up" category in your to-do list, so nothing gets forgotten.
Later, you can automate follow-ups, but the main thing is getting them out of your brain.
And then what?
Writing down all your tasks is the first step.
But it's not enough.
Next, you need to:
- sort what's important vs not
- set aside what can wait
- prioritize intelligently
- take action
That's exactly what we'll do with the maybe list, then with prioritization and execution techniques.
Conclusion
If you want to be calmer and more focused, start here: write everything down, right away.
Every recorded task is one less thought.
Every less thought is recovered mental energy.
Clearing the dark cloud is the solid base of any good work organization.
Go further
In the next step, we'll see how to sort all these tasks intelligently with the maybe list, so you don't overload your calendar with interesting... but non-essential things.
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