A Contrarian Strategy for Clearing Your Mind

For over 7 years, I’ve published a daily blog. That’s not an easy feat for anyone, let alone someone with ADHD.

At any moment, my mind is often filled with a million ideas, from sparks of inspiration to full-fledged fires.

In the swamp of my unfiltered mind, essay topics mix with to-do lists, course outlines mingle with product ideas, and marketing strategies dance with meal planning.

All of this is set to the background noise of conversations replays, as the RAM of my mind scours recent meetings and interactions for new nuggets to explore and share.

The Challenge

Our brains can only hold so much at once. All of our responsibilities and daily chores already occupy a significant portion of our bandwidth — no matter how many external systems you have set up to remember things for you.

When you add in conversations and other sources of ideas, your bandwidth can suddenly fill to capacity.

In this state, I find it difficult to sustain my focus and find coherence. Even if I have a clear topic in front of me, writing becomes a herculean task.

Here’s the strategy I use when this happens.

The Strategy: Clear Your Cache

Consider what happens on your computer when you have lots of tabs open in your browser. The whole system slows down. The computer doesn’t have enough working memory to operate at its full capacity. Its superpower gets diminished.

When your computer slows down, you don’t just close the open tabs. You also clear the cache.

We need to do the same thing with our brains when our bandwidth gets filled up with insights, ideas, and conversation replays.

In other words, a brain dump.

This might look like:

• writing an unfiltered stream of consciousness
• making lists
• talking it out into a voice memo

The Contrarian Mindset That Makes This Work

You may have heard this advice before. Perhaps you’ve even tried it only to find it didn’t work for you.

That’s likely because you tried to turn all the things clogging your mind into actionable tasks, projects, and ideas.

Here’s the missing piece that most of us don’t learn:

You don’t need to organize or act on anything you get out of your head.

Don’t put it into your task management system, don’t create new projects, don’t start adding new things to your agenda.

In fact, if you put pressure on yourself to turn the contents of your brain dump into new projects to take on, you’ll miss the point. Everything will just go right back into your head and occupy space again.

Sometimes I’ll outline several essays without writing any of them. I might make “to-do” lists of things that don’t really need to get done and that I know I won’t actually do. I release myself from the pressure to do anything at all with what comes out of my head. At least for the moment.

The point isn’t to channel those things into new projects — unless you want to. Rather, the point is to clear the cache so you can create space for the work you want to do.