My brain’s been frazzled lately. Too much going on, too many half-finished thoughts circling, none of them quite landing anywhere.
I know the fix. I just don’t always use it.
Write it down.
That’s it. That’s the whole trick. But it’s worth understanding why it works, because “just write it down” sounds like the kind of advice you nod at and ignore.
Your brain isn’t built for storage
David Allen, the productivity writer behind Getting Things Done, has a line that’s stuck with me: your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.
He calls the holding part psychic RAM. An uncaptured thought doesn’t just sit there quietly waiting. It stays open. Your brain keeps checking on it, making sure it hasn’t lost it - the way you’d keep glancing at a pan you’re worried might boil over. That checking costs you something - even though you never asked for it, and you’re barely aware it’s happening.
Do that with one thought and it’s nothing. Do it with the twenty things you’re currently half-holding onto, and you’ve got a brain running low on spare capacity before the day’s even properly started. That feeling of being frazzled, of everything seeming harder than it should, is often just this. Not a lack of ability. A backlog of open loops.
The relief is literal, not metaphorical
Here’s the bit I find genuinely interesting. The moment you write a thought down, somewhere you trust, your brain treats the loop as closed. Not eventually. Straight away.
You’re not solving the problem necessarily. You’re just telling your brain it doesn’t have to keep checking on it any more. And that’s enough. The relief isn’t a nice side effect of writing things down. It’s the actual mechanism.
It doesn’t need to be sophisticated
This is the bit people overcomplicate. You don’t need a system. You don’t need the right notebook or the right app or a method you’ve researched for a week before starting.
Pencil and paper does the job completely. Write anything. Write badly. Write about the thing that’s bothering you or the thing you’re avoiding or nothing in particular. The point isn’t the quality of what lands on the page. It’s that it’s no longer only in your head.
I use an app I built myself, called Zin, mostly because I want to find the thought again later rather than lose it to a notebook I’ll never reopen. That’s a “find it again” problem, though, not a “get the relief” problem. The relief happens the moment you write, regardless of where.
So if you’re feeling frazzled, that’s worth trying before anything else. Not because it’s profound. Because it’s available, right now, and it works.
Elsewhere
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LinkedIn post — the original
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More from David Allen: Getting Things Done
Author: Tony Radford — tonyradford.com