A brain-dump template, and the five minutes that make it work

Download the sheet

Two columns of sixteen lines, a circle by each line, nothing else. It is the same page as the inbox in the Three Things planner, laid out for paper.

Brain dump sheet, Letter   Brain dump sheet, A4

Why a brain dump beats a to-do list when your head is loud

A to-do list asks you to decide, while writing, whether each thing is a task, when it's due, and whether it matters. Those are three decisions per line, and on a loud day they're three too many. A brain dump asks for none of them. You write everything: the email, the weird noise the car makes, the thing you said in 2019. Deciding comes later, and separately, which is the point.

The five-minute method

1. Empty it (three minutes). Write until the pen slows down. Don't sort, don't rank, don't skip the stupid ones. Set a timer if you're the type who'd keep going for an hour.
2. Mark the circles (one minute). Go down the list and mark each circle with one of four things: a dot for "today", a dash for "this week", an S for "someday", nothing for "delete".
3. Move the dots (one minute). Pick up to three "today" items and write them on today's page. If you marked more than three, you still only move three. The rest become dashes.

That's it. The dashes go to the week page when you get to it. The S items go on a someday list you look at monthly. The unmarked ones stay on the sheet and are allowed to disappear.

What goes wrong, and the fix

"I dump and then never look at it." Do the circle step immediately, in the same sitting. The sheet is not the system; the three minutes plus the marks are.

"Everything feels like today." The three-item cap is the rule that saves you. If it's day four and something has been a dot every day, it's either a dash you're avoiding or a chunking problem. Break it into ten-minute steps.

"I have twelve sheets." Fine. Once a month, gather them, copy anything still alive onto one fresh sheet, and recycle the rest. Most of it won't be alive.

Doing it on an iPad

In the Three Things planner the inbox tab sits on every page, so the dump is one tap away whether you're on a day, a week or a tracker. There are 24 inbox pages, and you can duplicate any of them in GoodNotes or Notability. The day pages have the three lines already.