The Strategic Edge

Tayla rose

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Now, onto the app that cured my mental overload.

As always, the summary and action steps are at the end of the email.

18 months ago I created one page on one app that every single one of you probably have on your phone right now.

The notes app.

My life has never been the same.

I know what you’re thinking “yeah, okay, the notes app changed your life I’m sure it did”.

But genuinely, it did.

Here’s how.

An Overactive Mind Nearly Cost Me My Success

In 2022 I decided it was time to get serious about my future.

The issue was, I didn’t know what I wanted.

I was caught between two visions - building my own business or building a successful career in the corporate world.

So, I decided to pursue both, keep both options open for now.

I went to the networking events, made sure I kept up my uni grades, and started at my first corporate job.

At the same time, I started posting on social media, reading the business books, trying a bunch of different side hustles.

It was going great.

I was doing both, like I wanted.

But I had an issue.

My overactive mind.

My brain would not turn off, even when I was laying in bed exhausted.

I lived in constant chaos, so overwhelmed by the constant influx of information, tasks and responsibilities that I could never keep up with.

I was constantly stressed that I would forget about a work task, or a uni assignment.

I was constantly replaying conversations, thinking about my past, my future, my ambitions and my anxieties.

So it became a repeated pattern.

My alarm jolting me awake at 6am.

My brain immediately bombarded with everything I had to do that day, and everything I didn’t do the day before.

Trying to meditate, giving up when even that wouldn’t calm my mind.

Instead sitting down at my desk to dive straight into the first task that came to mind, realising an hour later that I’d completely forgotten about the work report that was due later that day.

As I said, complete chaos.

When I wasn’t working, I was consumed by thoughts of how I should be working.

When I was working, I couldn’t focus enough to actually get anything done.

This went on for months.

I felt so stuck.

I was working so hard.

I wanted to be successful so badly.

I wanted to prove to society wrong, to show the world, show myself, that it was possible to balance work with my own ambitions.

But my brain was constantly on overdrive, and I just knew I couldn’t keep living in this state.

Now, during this period of time I somehow came across the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Turns out, it was a productivity cult classic.

Listening to this book is what finally showed me that everything I was experiencing

The overwhelm
The mental fatigue
The stress and anxiety

It was normal, but it didn’t have to be.

All I needed to boost my mental clarity and productivity, and actually be able to prioritise what mattered most, was a way to organise my thoughts.

And organising my thoughts started what Allen called a “mind sweep”.

What most people now know as a “brain dump”.

The best way I can describe a brain dump is taking everything inside your head - the thoughts, ideas, tasks, recommendations - and transferring it outside your head.

A simple way to externalise all the noise.

The Science of Brain Dumping

“You’re telling me that writing your thoughts down on your phone cured your stress, brain fog and overthinking, okay…”

If you're doubtful, I get it, I was too.

Here’s why brain dumping carries so much power.

Especially for knowledge workers.

And especially with today’s distraction epidemic.

Brain dumping eliminates mental overload and subconscious stress

74GB

4 miles

11.8 hours

That’s how much information we consume every single day.

The same amount an extremely educated individual would process in an entire lifetime 500 years ago.

Combine this with our 70,000 daily thoughts, and the build up of all of this information over the past weeks, months, even years…

It’s no wonder we feel overloaded and unable to process even the simplest bits of information.

Now, information is 100% necessary to create quality work and live a meaningful life.

But not at the rate we are currently consuming it.

This is what happens when we are exposed to information.

Consuming more information is initially related to better performance and better decisions.

Until we reach a tipping point - the point of information overload (which, yes, is an actual thing).

At this point, the amount of information exceeds what our brains can process.

Instead, we go into a state of distraction, stress, and, as the name suggests, mental overload.

Our head is too full to take anything else in.

It’s so overwhelmed that when we try to do other tasks, we get that background hum of stress and those small hits of anxiety.

The feeling that there’s something persistently pushing on us, but we can’t work out exactly what or why.

The point of brain dumping isn’t to action everything in your head.

It’s to work out what’s actually in your head.

Get it out.

And plan to action it, to know you will action it.

This planning is what reduces the subconscious stress.

You go from knowing you have a million things to do, but not knowing what they actually are or when they will get done.

To gaining a sense of peace, and taking back control.

To allowing yourself be present in your life, instead of living in your mind.

You may still have a million things to do, you know what they are, and you know when they will get done.

You can let them go until you need to deal with them again.

Brain dumping is the simplest productivity booster

If I told you there was one thing you could do to

Get better sleep
Maximise your focus
Increase your brain power
Eliminate half your distractions
Never forget anything important
Save you time and energy searching for book recommendations or remembering that birthday present idea your dad mentioned 2 months ago

How much would you give for it?

Brain dumping gives you all of this for free.

It takes back the small mental pieces allocated to remembering a task or idea, and offloads it to a device that can remember it without a second thought.

It’s like taking a computer with 100 apps and 1000 tabs open, shutting them all down except the few you need.

The more mental pieces we take back (the more tabs we shut down)

The faster our mind (computer) runs
The more organised our mind (computer) feels
The better our productivity, our lives become

We spend hours looking for the best productivity hacks, the new apps, and the quick tips and tricks.

In reality, there’s a solution right in front of our eyes that works 10x better than all of these combined.

How To Start Brain Dumping

Option 1: Casual Relationship

There’s two ways you can use brain dumping.

The first is what I like to call a casual relationship.

I can’t speak from experience, but casual relationships typically have very little commitment.

You use them when you need
They relieve some stress and anxiety
There’s no real system or structure to them

The same thing applies to casual brain dumps.

They are perfect for when you need a quick, convenient way to quiet and calm your mind.

To get all the thoughts out of your head, to focus on what’s in front of you.

This is how my relationship with brain dumping started.

It's extremely simple

1. Grab a notebook & pen or your notes app

2. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes

3. Remind yourself that writing things down does not mean you have to action them right now

4. Allow yourself to write down everything and anything on your mind, without judgement.

5. Put your brain dump list aside, take a 2 minute reset, and start your work.

6. Action your list (optional)

Step 3 is especially important.

Missing this gets in the way of brain dumping for a lot of people.

When I first started brain dumping, I had so much resistance to it.

It almost made me more stressed.

Because in my mind, writing something down meant acknowledging it.

And acknowledging it meant I had to action it.

It was easier to operate on a basis of ‘ignore it until I can’t ignore it anymore’, than to face the reality of everything I had to do.

If you have the same train of thought, this is your permission slip.

You do not have to action anything you write down.

You do not have to look at that list again.

You can throw it out if you really want to.

Your casual relationship can just be a one night stand.

Is it the ideal option? No.

But it’s a starting point.

It’s one step up from not brain dumping at all, or worse, letting your brain dump make you more stressed?

This casual brain dumping will leave you with:

Better clarity and focus
Less stress and mental noise
An easy way to gain a big picture perspective of your thoughts and feelings

If you want a convenient, low commitment stress outlet that temporarily clears your mind — a casual relationship is for you.

Option 2: Committed Relationship

I continued in my casual relationship for a couple of months, but I soon found an issue.

This relationship was a short-term fix, not a long-term solution to my overwhelmed, constantly-on mind.

Yes, my work sessions became more focused.

But I was still waking up in the morning immediately slammed with that weight on my chest.

I still felt like I was thinking the whole night, instead of sleeping.

I still had this constant hum of anxiety acting as the soundtrack to my life.

I decided I was ready to turn my brain dumping into a committed relationship.

A committed relationship is a partnership that

You can trust
You interact with regularly
Gives you a long-term solution to your problem (of being single in this case)

So, as you’d expect, a committed brain dumping relationship stems from this.

It takes traditional brain dumps, and turns them into a system that leaves you with:

A place to capture all of your thoughts, ideas, recommendations
A list of tasks you need to action (now or in future)
A place to reference everything you don’t need to action (your book recommendations, present ideas, creative ideas, articles, etc.)

We’re no longer making a list that keeps getting longer and more overwhelming.

We’re operating a bigger system that is given inputs (our brain dumps), organised and actioned.

The result? You permanently reduce

Your information overload
The continuous presence of subconscious stress and anxiety
The inability to switch off, live in the moment and fully experience life
The feeling like your thoughts, to-do’s, mind and life are in a million different places

And strengthening this committed relationship over the past year…

It’s now a relationship I can’t live without.

Here’s how to get started with yours completely from scratch:

1. Decide on your capture space

Whatever tool you choose to house your brain dumps, it must have almost no resistance to access.

It must be easy.

The first brain dump page I created was in Notion.

It seemed obvious, I organised my life there, so entering it straight there made it easier to sort out later.

But as much as I loved Notion, my brain dumps didn’t, so I very quickly switched to the notes app.

Notion required internet, the notes app didn’t
Notion took 5-10 seconds to load, the notes app took 2
Notion had no easy search function, the notes app did

This is how the notes app changed my life.

With Apple’s device sync, I can access this page on my laptop too.

So, think about the easiest place for you to capture ideas.

It could be your Notes app
It could be sending a text message to yourself
If you’re old school, it could be a pocket notebook

Choose one, and stick with it. The place isn't important, as long as you use it.

2. Create a place to keep your tasks

You likely have a method of keeping track of your tasks right now, whether that’s your calendar, or a physical to-do list.

But if you're anything like 2022 me, you’re operating this by keeping everything in your head, then pulling tasks from your head to add to your calendar or list as you plan each day.

What we want to do here is create one master list that houses all of these tasks for us.

A list that, again, you can pull from when you plan your day, but that isn’t sitting in your head.

This could be as simple as creating a separate page in notes where all your actionable tasks sit.

I personally use a master to-do list on Notion, because I love the categorisation and other benefits it has.

This to-do list means you can

Put all your tasks in one place (& have one single source that houses everything you need to do)
Categorise and sort your tasks based on due date, priority, context & more
Include notes, files, links & more under each task

If you want to use Notion, I've created a free guide to get you started with your list in the Notion101 course.

3. Create a place to keep your references

We now have a place for all our tasks, amazing.

But what about everything we write down that we can’t action?

Ideas
Things to buy
Places to visit
Recommendations
Things you’re waiting on others for

This is where reference lists come in.

Again, if you’re using Notes, simply create a separate notes page for each reference list.

If you’re using Notion, create a separate page for each reference list.

You can keep this extremely simple by just writing things down in dot points under each page.

Or, you could go a step further, to make each list a database.

Let me give you some insight into just how much you could do with these.

I keep book recommendations in my ‘to read’ reference page, using a database.

I can categorise the books based on

Type (fiction / non-fiction)
Genre (fantasy, self-help, business, etc.)
Status (TBR, in progress, read)
Rating

I’ve also set up a template for each database item, so I can make notes and summaries on the books as I read them.

Doing this gives me one place to reference whenever I want to know anything about the books I'm interested in.

This is just to show you what's possible - you don't have to start here.

What I would suggest for most people, is to start simple.

Create a page for each reference list (and add more as you need).

Use dot points.

When you have spare time (& if you want), play around with some more complicated options.

Here’s some inspiration to get you started, from pages that I use, and that I’ve created in Notion builds for clients:

To buy
To cook
To read
To watch
Waiting on
Present ideas
Places to visit
To drink (ie. tea / cocktail / wine tracker)
Someday maybe list (things you might like to do in future)

This not only saves you mental energy, but also an incredible amount of time searching for inspiration and information.

4. Turn brain dumping and organising into a habit

This is what really brings the system to life.

In a committed relationship, you talk to your partner every day, likely multiple times.

You see them at least once a week.

And you enjoy talking to and seeing them.

This is what we want to emulate with our brain dumping.

Make it an ever-present, positive part of your life.

Create the habit of writing things in your ‘brain dump’ page every time the opportunity arises.

You could even set an hourly alarm for a few days to help you get into the habit.

Then, create the habit of organising and sorting your list.

I’d suggest doing this at least twice a week to keep it short and manageable, and to allow you to address anything needing short-term action.

For me, I always include this in my weekly reset, and often use one train ride home per week for my second time.

Like any healthy habit, it’s not necessarily going to be easy at first.

You’ll forget.

You’ll feel resistance.

It'll might feel 'annoying' sometimes.

But once you start reaping the rewards - the mental clarity, stress reduction and sense that your life is finally organised - you won’t want to stop

So start by making it something you look forward to.

Put on some music
Connect with friends and do it together
Plan a weekly coffee shop date with yourself

Like any habit, the key to consistency is making it something you enjoy.

Action Steps

I genuinely cannot explain just how much this has changed my life.

I no longer feel constant overwhelm.

I no longer feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water.

I no longer have the constant hum of background noise and subconscious stress.

This isn't something we're taught in school, but in our society, it's an essential skill.

So I hope this gave you the masterclass that school never did.

If you're ready to put this into action, here's where to start

1. Decide whether to enter into a casual relationship (to try it out first) or if you're ready for commitment

2. If you chose casual, do some regular brain dumps following the 6 steps we went through in that section

3. If you chose committed:

Decide on one capture space, set it up, and make it as easy to access as possible
Create a place to keep your tasks
Create a place to keep your reference lists
Implement 2-3 strategies that will help you turn brain dumping and organising into a habit

If you got this far, thank you, I appreciate your support endlessly.

I'm looking to learn more about you, your goals and what you'd love the most help with.

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See you next week!

Tayla

Whenever you’re ready, there’s 3 ways I can help you:

Custom Notion Builds: Have the vision but lacking the time or expertise? I build your vision to life, you receive a digital environment optimised for your success.
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Deep-Dive Call: Want to dive deep into a specific topic, or gain clarity on your next steps? In this 50 minute call we will focus on developing strategies to move you closer to the life you want to live.