TLDR: When you have an external system for capturing your tasks, appointments, and ideas, it frees up internal capacity you can use to think on a larger scale.
CAVEAT: Your external system has to be reliable for this to work, so developing and refining it to fit your brain is a must.
(As always, find your next step at the end!)
Have you ever walked into a room and completely forgotten why you’re there?
Of course you have—you’re human.
It’s not necessarily age that causes this either (please don’t say it’s age, or I’m old!)
This happens because our brains are bad at remembering.
You know that old ‘forgetful-genius’ trope? The one about that person who can solve the most complex of societally important problems without breaking a sweat, but can’t find their glasses to read off the answer?
To some extent, that’s all of us.
Another description that probably fits all of us at one point or another is that we’re carrying an immense amount of information in our heads and then feeling disappointed when we can’t keep it all straight.
We need to stop feeling bad about this. And that’s not ‘grace culture’ talking. It’s objective science.
Sure, there might have been times in your life when you felt like you could keep it all straight. I’m not here to argue with you—I’m here to ask you if the memory of feeling able to do that is keeping you stuck.
Even if you can ‘keep it all in your head’, you’re wasting space by storing it there.
Our brains are wonderful, almost magical organs. But they’re designed for thinking—not remembering.
So if you’re doing a stellar job of keeping every little task, appointment, and idea stored neatly in your head … well honestly, my inner neat freak is kind of impressed.
But, as attractive as neatly stored information can be, it can’t exist without occupying space.
So now you have a question to ask yourself:
Do I want to use valuable space inside my brain by remembering these things? Or is it time to create an external system that can do that for me?
What Are You Missing by Remembering Everything?
Last week, I wrote about How To (Actually) Make a Plan. But sometimes there’s (actually) an invisible barrier to planning that has nothing to do with our interest/inspiration/willingness to try planning.
I think that barrier is our information storage system.
Let’s take a break from responsibility-led examples and imagine (what should be) a purely positive scenario that you want to plan.
A good friend you haven’t seen in a long time calls to see when you’re free to finally get together and catch up. Immediately, your mind starts running through everything it can remember about what’s going on this week, what has to get done as soon as possible, and anything else that you might have forgotten about.
As much as you genuinely want to make a date, you can’t, because you can’t confidently answer them. That’s because you’re trying to mentally reconstruct your schedule from memory rather than being able to just look at it.
So you say you’ll call them back, but either one of you might forget. Because that’s just busy, adult life … isn’t it?
It doesn’t have to be.
How an External Storage System Makes Planning Possible
When my life became legitimately “busy” I discovered something profound:
It wasn’t the amount of work that was draining my mental capacity—it was the organization of that work.
Brain space is mental capacity. And not being able to make a plan you truly want to make demonstrates a lack of it in your life.
The grocery lists, appointments, and necessary-so-the-house doesn’t-blow-up-maintenance tasks are all obvious culprits when it comes to using up brain space.
But there’s more taxing your brain in the remembering department than you may realize.
There are also silent drains on our capacity. These can be just as strong and, unfortunately, are things that we seem to be the best at ignoring. Things like:
Incomplete projects we have no ‘reason’ to finish
Ideas that can’t be acted on now or even soon
Decisions we keep deciding, over and over
You probably already know that You Don’t Have Too Many Things, You Have Too Many Decisions. Reducing the recurring decisions in your life (about food, cleaning, clothing etx.) can be such a capacity-increasing gift to yourself.
But while you’re creating your external storage system, don’t forget about things like projects and ideas. Just like a task list, holding ideas in your mind keeps it active even when you’re not doing anything about them, and that creates Brain-Drain.
The solution is not to stop having tasks (you can’t), or to set aside ideas and projects (please don’t!).
It’s to stop making your brain responsible for keeping track of them. And that starts with creating reliable external systems that can hold on to what you’re not actively thinking about right now.
There are two types of systems that can help you do that.
2 Types of Systems to Fight Brain Drain
There are two types of systems that help prevent brain space from being wasted on remembering: the physical organization type and the mental organization type.
The physical systems are the most straightforward to design. These are the kind of organization systems you can put in place to create physical spaces that are as easy to use as possible (if you need some inspiration in this department, read 5 Foundational Systems Every Home Needs.)
For example, when everything in your home has a designated place, you know exactly where to get something when you need it. Not hunting it down, no asking anyone else where it might be, no remembering where it is.
The same organizational principles apply to building a mental organization system, which is exactly what an external storage system for your brain is.
When it comes to organizing the things taking up space in your brain, your system’s goal is to create a method for:
Recording tasks, requests and appointments as they come up
Logging ideas, recommendations, and other things you’d like to follow up on
Tracking status and next steps for projects that happen over longer time periods
Retaining reference information (such as receipts for taxes)
To be clear, we’re not talking about an old fashioned filing cabinet.
We’re talking about creating a way to easily capture all the information that springs up during day to day life so that you know exactly where to get it when the time comes for you to act on it.
How To Design An External Storage System For Your Brain
When you’re brainstorming your external storage system, start by thinking about what your day to day actually looks like.
Effectively capturing information is going to look different for a stay at home parent than it will for an office worker or on-the-go college student.
Next, consider some of these basic capture methods and if they would work with your everyday life:
Paper:
I.e. notebooks, index cards, scraps of paper, or saving physical materials like invitations, bill notices or flyers
Digital:
I.e. apps, emailing or texting yourself, voice memos, screenshots, photos, or saving digital invitations, bills, or promotions
If you’re not immediately sure what would work for you, I have two pieces of advice.
First, stay open to trying them all. The best way to find out if a system works is to test run in it real life. Also, don’t feel like you have to choose analog or digital—the combination can be a beautiful thing.
Before we get into my personal external storage system I want to give you another piece of advice, because it’s what has helped my personal development immensely.
You don’t have to commit to any system just because you chose it. It’s not only okay to rethink and refine your systems—it’s a crucial part of building systems that support you and the life you truly want to live.
My Personal External Storage System
When your brain knows that everything will be safely captured for later reference, it will stop wasting power trying to remember it all for you.
This might take some time—we’re creatures of habit, after all. The most important thing about teaching your brain to trust your system is this:
Consistently Process What You Capture
Getting everything out of your head is great (really—it can relieve so much internal pressure!) But if you don’t do anything with that information, your subconscious is still going to stress about it.
So it’s crucial to consistently go through all your notes and make decisions about them.
Here’s how I do that at this stage of my life.
When I first started designing my system, I wanted everything to be centralized and it all to be analog. I had little stacks of index cards tucked in my purse, my nightstand, even the bathroom drawer (shower thoughts!)
Index cards are still part of emptying my brain, but my capture method has developed over time into that beautiful combination that I referenced earlier.
The centralization goal is still key, but it naturally changed from “have a centralized way to capture notes” to “have a centralized way to process notes.”
Centralized Processing Makes Consistency Possible
For my centralized processing place, I must give credit to my Sunday Basket, created by Lisa Woodruff at Organize365. I’m not affiliated with them in any way (except as a grateful student!) but I do love how perfectly my Sunday Basket fits into a 13” Kallax cube. For me, it was worth the $75 investment to have something well made that looks beautiful in my office and visually contains all my papers.
But remember: you don’t need to spend any money to create your processing place. When I started, I used a $5 plastic handle basket from Target that I had on hand.
The point is creating a visual anchor for yourself. Phone reminders are helpful, but there’s something about a physical cue. Having a regular time and place to do your processing is like muscle memory for your brain.
Regular Processing Time Builds A Natural Habit
I do my weekly planning on (you guessed it) Sundays, so this is when I do my processing. That helps me make a plan that can actually work by taking into account the reality of everything I have going on.
During the week, I gather everything that comes at me and set aside anything that’s not immediately urgent until Sunday (by the way, do you also find that just as much is “coming at you” internally as it is externally?)
Currently, I’m capturing information in what might seem like a lot of different ways, but it works for me—as long as I'm processing it consistently.
I capture with:
Index cards stored with pens in convenient places
A weekly brain dump on a designated legal pad
My paper planner
My digital calendar
My 3 Next 3 worksheet
Emails to myself
Photos on my phone’s camera roll
Apple Notes on my phone
Right before processing time, I make the rounds to gather all my information in front of me.
I open my email and digital calendar on my laptop, grab my phone, and pull out my Sunday Basket, which neatly holds all the paper notes (plus receipts, mail and small physical to-dos, like Amazon returns that need to be made). I also keep my pens and highlighters, paper planner, and legal pad with its attached clipboard all in an adorable $10 fabric basket. Because hey, we’re allowed to enjoy our work time!
This entire setup takes me less than a minute.
Then I process for a set amount of time to get a handle on my priorities before I make my weekly plan.
Capturing information instead of carrying it around in your head can truly be life changing. It has relieved so much internal pressure and increased my capacity to really think more than I could have imagined until I actually tried it.
And it didn’t take “the perfect system” to work. It only took starting the process of designing one.
I hope you’ll start today.
Because your brain has better things to do.
HERE’S YOUR NEXT STEP:
Find one category of information you're tired of trying to remember, and give it a reliable place to live outside your head.
Then mark your calendar for processing day!
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