taming the brain: planning to plan

I think I need some sort of filter for my brain. There are way too many thoughts swirling around at any given time. I feel like I used to be better at keeping things nice and organized up there; I often did not bother making lists because I was able to do it mentally. But more and more I feel like I have lost that ability. More and more I find myself getting overwhelmed by the thoughts that jump around, lacking coherency. A new development is an inability to turn off these incessant thoughts when I go to bed, resulting in sleepless nights. And I’m sure that the additional tiredness just makes things worse in my head.

Maybe my inability to track my thoughts more systematically is a result of getting older. Maybe it has something to do with the internet-surfing mindset: we jump around from point to point so frequently that our brain’s pathways get distorted somehow, and start following that pattern with all of our thoughts. Maybe I’m just an ADD girl in an ADD world.


I am frustrated because I feel as though I have so many things that need to be attended to, and I feel unable to do them. I sit down to write a list and forget what it was I wanted to remember. Tonight, I had things I wanted to do, but made stupid mistakes (like leaving paperwork on my desk at work) and cannot get those things done now, after all. I get really irritated when I do things like that.

I need to be better about keeping track of things externally, ie, write them down more. At work, my boss has just left on a 6 month sabbatical abroad. Before he left he had been drilling into us about how we need to write down everything we do, and make to-do lists, and set deadlines, etc etc etc – all that project management stuff that scientists never actually learn (there’s a reason for the absentminded professor stereotype). I’ve started implementing these techniques, and surprise surprise, they are pretty helpful. After listing out all of the different projects that I have to work on, and specific components of each one, I was a little overwhelmed – there’s a lot of stuff! No wonder I struggle to keep on top of things.

Listing out all my tasks and putting timelines on them is definitely a good way to get things moving, instead of stagnating as “oh yeah I should do that” in the back of my mind. It does feel like a lot of work though. And a bit tedious. I think that’s why it’s hard for us engineer types to do it – it feels kind of unproductive to spend so much time listing out all these to-do’s, instead of actually *doing*. But, I realize that it’s necessary. Now I just need to start implementing some of the same things in my personal life. I have seen evidence that quantifying important goals externally can help get them accomplished: at the beginning of the year, I made a list of personal goals for 2009. There were a lot of them, some small, some fairly ambitious. And coming up to the end of the year, it is really really satisfying to look back on that list and see that I accomplished almost everything. If I hadn’t made that list, I probably would not have done so many of the things that I wanted to do. This blog is actually one of them, as one of my goals was to write more. It’s been a month since I started this blog, and my writing frequency has definitely increased!

Writing has always been my go-to way of sorting through my emotions. I have kept a journal for most of my life as a place to vent my feelings when they overwhelmed me. After writing out my feelings, I always feel better. It makes so much sense that I would also feel better after writing down all of the to-do’s that I have in my head, if they are overwhelming me. I think one of my biggest issues is not having one central place to track all my lists: doing it on paper doesn’t work well because I lose scraps of paper or forget which notebook I used. At work, we are using Microsoft OneNote which I really like, but doing it on a computer is not always portable - I tend to remember things I need to do when I’m out on the el, or walking to the bus, etc. Maybe I need to finally invest in a smart phone. I don’t know! But I need a system. Any suggestions for ways to make list-making more manageable?