Hi this is Cyril from Work Smarter Live Better. In this video, I want to share the first step of what we call “decluttering your mind”.
I was in a workshop recently for a large retail company and I had a few hundred people in front of me and I asked a very simple question to the audience. And the question is “What tool, what system do you use to manage your task?” You know we all have different systems task list, whatever you want to use. And so always going round and so on, and one person said, “Look for me, the best system that I use is I try to remember things and keep things in my head.”
In my experience having worked with many people, your head is a very poor task management system. It’s actually quite a lot of stress to try to remind everything you have to do and to say one way to think about and to organize my task as my head.
My simple advice on this one is Capture on the fly. What do I mean by capture on the fly.
As soon as you think about something you have to do, write it down. It’s as simple as this: Don’t keep your head to remind anything you have to do. As soon as you think about something, you capture it.
That’s the first step and then you’re going to have to action it. But just on this first step make it easy for you. What do I mean? You can use your mobile phone and in your mobile phone, you have an app called notes. In your notes, I highly suggest you create two specific notes. One called “to do office” and one called “to do home”. You could be walking in the middle of the street instantly reminding of “Ah I need to do this in the office”. Write it down capture it.
I also suggest that you carry with you one of these mini notepad, one of the small mini notepad where you can write things down. And so if you think about something you need to sketch it, you can write it down.
You can even use your mobile phone for those to get an iPhone, you can use Siri and you can send an email to yourself very easily. And the way to do this is you press on Siri and you say email myself and then it asks you a subject and you say whatever subject is, write this proposal for example, and then in the body it’s going to ask you what would you want to write down, say “remind me to write the proposal for ABC Corporation” or whatever you want, and then send.
So easy to capture on the fly nowadays. Don’t keep it in your head, just write it down.
I was recently in the US and we’re working with a team and taking them through a journey and we’re halfway through the journey and I was asking them how things are going? And one of the leader, he said to me, “Cyril, just this little thing for me to capture on the fly all the time made a huge impact. I was always trying to remember things and keeping a lot of thing in my mind, yes I write to do list and so on but also thinking that I can remember. And just to declutter my brain made a huge impact”. Do not underestimate the power of capturing on the fly.
This is this week tip for Work Smarter Live Better. If you have any advice that you want to share with everyone around how you declutter your brain, just share it with us. You have a lovely day, until next time. You take care.
Cheers!
