Getting Things Done

[Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like.

It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future.

I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist.

If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.

Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ...

[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation.

The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.