Increase Your Focus with a Mind Dump

​Do you sometimes have trouble focusing on your work? Do you jump into a task only to be distracted and pulled away by another idea? Or how about losing track of what someone is saying midway through a conversation? “I’m sorry, can you please repeat that again?”

Taking just a few minutes to perform a mind dump can reap great benefits.  It can allow you to get pressing issues off of your mind and allow you to focus on the task at hand. So get ready to export whatever is on your mind right now and enjoy greater productivity as a result.

Video transcript:

You've got a lot of things on your plate today. You've got a lot of email to get to. You've got meetings to attend. You've got phone calls you need to make. And don't forget about that report that's due at the end of the day.

You're going to need an awful lot of focus to do everything that you want and accomplish everything on your to-do list. However, sometimes the biggest distraction to our most important work is ourselves

Have you ever sat down and tried to focus on a particular task when suddenly a pressing issue or a new idea or something that you haven't thought about for a number of days pops into your head and pulls you away from that particular task?

Well, if you've experienced this before, you may be in need of a mind dump. What's a mind dump? It's really pretty simple. It's taking whatever's on your mind right now and exporting it somewhere else. It could be a piece of paper, it could be a spreadsheet, it could be Evernote, whatever you use to capture new ideas or new notes. I want you to take whatever's pressing on your mind right now and put it on that piece of paper or put it on that note taking tool.

With that information safely tucked away, you can give the current task or that current conversation the attention it deserves. Once the meeting is over or once you've completed that task, you can return to those set of notes and deal with them appropriately.

Now a mind dump can be very beneficial for yourself but it can also benefit those around you. I know a manager who conducts a weekly team meeting and at the beginning of that meeting she hands out a piece of paper to everyone in attendance. She gives them five minutes to perform a mind dump. Five minutes to export whatever is up here onto that piece of paper.

Why does she do this? Well she wants her team's full attention for the remainder of that meeting and she knows the chances of having their full attention are that much greater once they've exported whatever they're worrying about, whatever issues, or maybe even things that they're excited about onto that piece of paper.

​So whether it's for the benefit of yourself or if it's the benefit of your team, perform a mind dump today. It's very simple.