The Magic of the Brain Dump

Until a couple years ago I often had trouble falling asleep at night because I always had to ride the rapid stream of thoughts rushing through my head. One night the stream went meta, and I recognized it needed an outlet.

So as an experiment, I bought a stack of legal pads and put them next to my bed. Then over several weeks, I wrote down every thought that came to mind and followed every path, no matter how long it took.

The first few rounds took hours -- I'd usually fall asleep with the pad in hand, and the pads were piling up so I had to go get more -- but gradually things subsided. After several weeks and a pile of legal pads, the waters quieted down and I was able to sleep at night. The spillway worked.

Right about the time I completed this experiment, someone serendipitously asked on Quora, "How can I sleep without my mind thinking of a million things?". Just now when I went back to reference the URL (http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-sleep-without-my-mind-thinkin...) I was reminded of the quote by Charlotte Brontë -- "A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow".

Now I use Evernote as my thought outlet throughout the day, and this magical little hack continues to work - no more racing waters, no more restless pillows.

Simple enough, write 750 words a day. But what gets me going is the depth of analytics that just gets thrown in as a bonus after you finish each entry. Emotional state, preoccupations, etc. tracked through time.

You'll have an idea of it if you try and write one.

A long time I had the belief that "smart people don't need to jote down things to remember -- they can hold it all in their head - they're smart :)" And hey, I'm smart -- so I'm going to do the same. Needless to say, it was a very foolish things to believe in.

I would say though, reminding myself to take the little effort needed to write something down, is important. Often time I am too lazy to even press Ctrl+Alt and switch to my text editor and write down what thoughts I as having. Reminding myself to do this, and not carry around various TODOs and other such baggage than slows down my general thinking abilities, is crucial.

Now a question to HNers: I've run into trouble organizing the various "brain dumps" (basically, a collection of text files). I sometimes forget about them, and never get back to them. How do you manage this issue? (ie. how do you organize your brain dumps and make sure things are done, etc.?)

At the end of every day, I process the last day's worth of notes. Appointments/meetings go onto my calendar, tasks go into TeuxDeux, and cash expenses go into YNAB.

Because of that I'm thinking of developing a 'brain dump' service, that you can send an email to. You would host it on your own device. The service will read it's inbox and add messages from authorized senders to a plain-text repository, and offer the most simple things like login, listing and search functionality.