Getting Things Started: The Brain Dump

While I’m enjoying this week’s theme, we’re far from the first to discuss some of the thought behind setting and keeping goals. Our friends at Lifehacker and 43 Folders are everyday stalwarts on the subject and will help keep you motivated long after I’ve lost all hope for self-improvement and have started writing about how to let prune juice ferment in a sock again.

A big inspiration for both those sites is the book/planning system Getting Things Done, which I suggest to anyone preoccupied with listing and cataloging their goals and to-dos. Again, without treading too far into their territory, I’d like to steal a page out of GTD that I’ve found useful, even though I haven’t fully integrated the system into my workflow. (I find GTD useful as an occasional “circle the wagons” tool, but don’t have the wherewithal to keep it up on a daily basis.)

The first step in GTD is to dash out everything you think you might be interested or compelled to do, from gratifying trifle to life-shaking event. From there you can organize and index your goals, but I often find it an extremely useful trick just to take a piece of paper or a text file (or a blog post, after the jump) and to dump every little thought that pops into my head over the course of an hour or two without any attempt to prioritize the items themselves.

Feel free to dump your list in the comments, should you please, but it’s far from necessary, especially if it will somehow prevent you from being completely candid about your goals. I think taking half-an-hour at the beginning of the year to dump all the floating ideas in my head feels great, even if I don’t end up doing much to follow up on them.

Grow Mushrooms – http://www.fungi.com/kits/indoor.html
Bottle the batch of beer I have in the primary and start a regular beer brewing schedule
Learn Spanish
Register Dethroner Trademark
Form Dethroner LLC
Figure out how to roast my green beans (just buy a roaster?)
Plan Jan-Feb themes for Dethroner and punch into wiki
Promote Dethroner to Men’s Mags
Do Taxes
Clean up backporch
Get Passport renewed
check out that girl I went to high school with’s theater
plan another trip home to KC
get some sort of working plan together for CES, incl. per-writer checklist
Get Wally Wood, GH posters, porter painting framed
Yoga + Ladder Workout Everyday
Elliptical Everyday
Cancel Gym membership
make sausage
buy more suits
lose final 20 lbs
get a better workflow/habits
look into free state project (too aggressive against a “nanny state”?)
get a good notebook and a good pen
take trip to montefiore to deliver final games and take pics
respond to guest blogger potentials for dethroner
play carsconne with susie
get bedroom clutter taken care of, incl. cleaning out closets
vacuum out baseboard heaters
get that old treo, etc. on ebay
throw away or pack up and basement product boxes
put a bookshelf on second desk (or clean out that ikea shelf thing maybe?)
order watch batteries for that flashlight kit
take laptop to pt to get etched
get taxes done
try to implement GTD again, incl. the physical folders
sort and store loose CDs/DVDs
automate backups for dethroner
find PHP hacker/general site tweaker
plan and cook one meal a week
finish twilight princess
start using gcal on a regular basis
buy file cabinet
take shirts in to dry cleaners
buy slacks
buy another copy of GTD or find PDF
take on bob in company fo heroes
cleanup houseplants
buy and run that baseboard wiring run stuff
transplant that pineapple