Node Glue

A thought just came to me about the use of “psychic RAM”.

First, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “psychic RAM,” it has nothing to do with paranormal computing!  It’s the term that David Allen uses to represent that short term memory where we store a lot of stuff, TODOs and the like.  The idea is that we need to get that stuff out of our psychic RAM and collected into some sort of trusted system that will prompt us to do something about our stuff at the right time and in the right context.  By getting that stuff off our mind–psychic RAM–we can un-busy our minds and focus on more creative work.

But I think my tendency might be to overkill on the brain dumping process.  My hypothesis now is that we really only need to externalize the trigger, the provocation, the bit of our brains that is the key to reopen the briefcase containing the rest of the mental contents necessary for an action.

If I overdo it, I write down too much stuff, which expends time and energy that may not result in a pay off of completed actions and tangible progress.

If I underdo it, writing down too little, I either lose important bits of information to my memory loss, or else I keep my mind busy with those “open loops” that I’d do better to capture somewhere and get off my mind.

I’m wondering what my life would be like if I adopted a more minimal approach to capturing the stuff in my mind, focusing not on comprehensive dumping, but on capturing those more concise triggers…

Using ResultsManager has become about as automatic to me as waking up and brewing a pot of coffee. It’s just part of life.

A question was asked in a comment to a previous post about how my ResultsManager usage was going. I thought I’d post a response here with a trackback to reply.

I don’t know if you’ll find this comment below an older post, but I’m wondering how things are going with ResultsManager over the last month-and-a-half.

I tried it out last year, and got frustrated at the complexity, but after being off it for a while, I’ve come to miss two things:

1) Seeing the big picture, or larger context of my life
2) Habitually working in MindManager (I tend to open it less–and thus benefit from its creative encouragement–when I’m not using for daily activities)

Please post an update on your progress.

ResultsManager helps me maintain my sanity by giving me decent level of command over of the stuff of my life. So, yes, to your point #1, ResultsManager continues to be a big picture win for me.

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I’ve recategorized some of my previous posts, opening a new category for posts that touch more on the “messy human elements” of productivity and systems.

A listing of those posts are here: Heart of Productivity.

I have a feeling that I’ll be blogging more in this direction in the future, along with continued scripts and tips using my favorite tools for productivity–ResultsManager, MindManager, GyroQ, ActiveWords, GyroActivator.