Your Brain Isn't a To-Do List (Stop Treating It Like One)

A 15-minute daily habit to empty your mental inbox

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

Most advice for over-thinkers focuses on managing your thoughts - meditate, journal, reframe. It's good advice. But it assumes the problem is what's happening inside your head - when sometimes the problem is you actually do have too much to think about.

There are lots of things that could be cluttering your head, but one of the biggest is unfinished business:

• The email you'll reply to later.

• The text you'll deal with tomorrow.

• The plan you'll figure out sometime this week.

It isn't the whole problem, but it's a bigger share of it than people realise - and it's the easiest part to fix.

Why does unfinished business clutter your head?

Working memory is the mental workspace you use to hold things in mind right now - like keeping "glass of water" in your head as you walk to the kitchen. It has limited space, and your brain keeps anything in it that you might need to act on soon.

In short, it’s a way of keeping memories within arm's reach, in case you need to act on it.

The trouble is that "might need to act on soon" is a low bar. Anything unfinished qualifies, because your brain can't rule out that you might be doing this task in the near future. So the workspace fills up with things like:

• The dentist appointment you keep meaning to book

• The weird email from your boss you haven’t replied to

• The thing your friend said last week that you’re still turning over

When too many things pile up there, that's the feeling of oh I have to write this email → oh I need to call the dentist → oh and the boss thing → wait, the email - round and round, because nothing in it is getting handled.

How to clear your head

The way to get something out of your working memory is to convince your brain you don't need it in the near future. You can do this two ways: move it into the past, or move it to the future.

• Into the past: do it. Drink the water, turn off the stove, send the email. There’s no need to keep context about a task completed.

• Into the future: schedule it. Move it to a defined point ahead of you - a specific time, place, or trigger. There's no need to keep context about a task your brain knows is set for later.

A 2011 study by Masicampo and Baumeister tested this directly. They had people write about important unfinished tasks, then read a novel. The people with unfinished tasks had more intrusive thoughts and worse comprehension - until they were asked to make a specific plan for handling the task.

That's what a system is for.

You need a system to move things out of your head