Dream Catcher
Useful if you find that your attention frequently gets pulled away from the activity at hand by passing thoughts.
A dream catcher is a sheet of paper or an easily accessible note on your device. When a new idea occurs to you (an impulse to look something up, write a script, whatever) write it in the dream catcher – where it will be safe until later, then return to your current focus.
Apply that consistently, and you will find your focus able to stay where you want it to, more often. And you can decide later (in a more considered way) how to respond to each of the things in your dream catcher. For example, you could go over the dream catcher as part of your weekly reflection, and decide whether to add items to your task system or put them in a longer-term archive.
Thought Inbox
From George Woodliff-Stanley, one of the BGI coaches:
A Thought Inbox is trusted place to put everything you’re thinking about! It can be a place where you do something like…
- I’m working on something…
- Oh, now I’m thinking about something totally unrelated
- Opens thought inbox and jots down a sentence or two about the thing I’m thinking about
- Now I’m working on the original thing again, and not worried about “losing” the interesting thought
I find that I can care for both the “thinking-about-something” me and the “trying-to-do-something-else” me when I have a place where I can write down just enough that I trust it will trigger the same chain of thought if I come back to it later.
Example tech options:
- Browser-based: Roam! Its Daily Notes feature makes for a top-caliber thought inbox.
- It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but don’t worry about understanding all the features right away. Because of the way Roam works, even if your use of it is messy / unorganized now, that won’t be a problem later.
- Here’s one review of and intro to Roam
- And, as a bonus, you can use Fluid to make it into a “native” app that lives outside your web browser, so you’re not as likely to get distracted by other stuff that lives in your web browser when you use it.
- Caveat: Roam is exciting enough to me it can become a distraction of its own. If you’d like a more lightweight option, try nvALT (below).
- For Mac: I have used nvALT for this purpose for years, and it has served me immensely well.
- It’s an ooold piece of software, but very powerful and lightweight and ideal for this kind of thing. I can bring it up with a global hotkey, start typing, and in seconds have a new note to put my thoughts that I can later link from other notes and so on. Fabulous for clearing things out of my mind and letting me stay focused on the task at hand.
- There’s also a replacement for it actively being built, that will use the same note format / etc: http://nvultra.com — and the note format is just a flat directory of plaintext or markdown files, so there’s nothing to worry about re: getting locked into some format that only this software can read.