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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'm more interested in the concept of typing gibberish to clear your mind. What particular kind of gibberish? Doggerel verse? Blind keyboard mashing?

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I often do an exercise that I've started referring to as a "brain dump". Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, for whatever reason, it helps to just simply start typing. I start by just saying whatever is most present on my mind, and each new thought starts on a new line. More often than not I end up drilling down to some kind of inner conflict buried pretty deep in my mind.

What's really amazing is when seemingly unrelated stressful moments in your life are revealed to be from the same source.

The thought of doing that is kindof scary. Who knows what I might end up typing!?

Of course, this is probably a reason to do it.

I picked up on it from this site: http://750words.com/ It's rather cathartic, although you're right that letting your mind wander within a recorded stream sometimes means you write down some quite scary stuff, it's probably the same part of the brain that says "you could jump, you know" whenever you look over a high ledge

Apropos of nothing I believe this works because it frees up space in your brain. Sometimes, when I'm trying to get too much done at once, I'm stressed out by trying to keep to many things in the forefront of my thoughts at once. When I get stuck like that I create a scratch pad document with three 'zones'

   Doing:
      stuff I'm working on right now

   ToDo:
      Stuff that I know needs to get done

   Done: 
     Stuff that is now done.

Start by dumping everything I'm thinking of in 'Todo' and pick one and put it in Doing and while I'm in the middle of doing it when I think thoughts like "oh and this should really do x" I add that to the Todo pile and go back to doing. Each time I finish of the 'Doing' task I scan the todo list, move anything I need to into Done and pull one up for the Doing pane.

By externalizing the bookkeeping of all the things I'm trying to keep straight in my head I free up cycles to actually work on something.

Did you mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board ?

Nice! I hadn't actually seen that but that is exactly what I mean. Although rather than help the team be more productive it's to let me be more productive :-)

http://www.trello.com ?

Yes, Trello does this pretty well. Not "switch to the buffer in vim" well :-) but its a great tool. An iPad version would be cool.

The recently discussed http://mindmup.com works beautifully for me for this -- I just start lobbing the features and head noise into nodes and organize until some watershed where I realize I know what I need to do.

Just tried this, very relaxing, quite amazing how many different things you have spinning around your head at any one time...

I've found it is rare that I ever re-read my notes, no matter how much I might think I'll want to when I'm making them. This can be an idea or a long-term to-do list or the outline of a blog post, whatever. If I don't use it immediately after I'm done typing, it never gets read again.

As a result, I've started saving things less and less. However it's still useful to initially type them out. Helps me plan and form my thoughts and ideas. Currently this usually involves opening Textmate or Tumblr (and saving drafts) or email.

Hopefully this will be a solid replacement for all of the above. If I end up typing something I do want to use, then I'll copy and paste it elsewhere. The majority of the time I'll simply close the browser and not save it.

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