How I Use AI to Turn a Brain Dump Into a To-Do List
AI conversation has become a new kind of Brain Dump, helping me figure out what belongs on my Nice Clean List.
David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) was one of my early organizing influences. One of the ideas I took from GTD was the importance of recording all the things you are trying to remember rather than trying to keep them in your head. That idea became part of my own Messy Planning system.
In The Messy Planning Workbook, I describe undone tasks and ideas as “open loops.” Every undone loop floating around inside your head takes up space, energy, and, most importantly, attention. Having all the loops written down means you no longer have to remember them. You can go back to your planner to be reminded.
The Messy Planning system has two ways to gather up those open loops. A Harvest gathers the things that are already outside your head but scattered around your life. A Paper Harvest might turn up a bill on the kitchen counter, an appointment card in your purse, a sticky note on your desk, or something you scribbled on the refrigerator. A Digital Harvest does the same thing with email, apps, and text messages. The point is to gather “everything related to tasks, events, or Big Ideas into one place” so you can decide what to do with it.
Then the Brain Dump goes looking for the things that are still inside your head. When your brain feels full, start with a blank sheet of paper and write down everything that is chasing around in your head—the ideas, worries, Big Thoughts, and everyday tasks. Don’t worry about grammar or what the page looks like. Just write things down until your brain feels a little less crowded.
Once you’ve gathered all this stuff, you have to process it. Events go on your calendar, Big Ideas and notes go into your notebook, and tasks and projects go on what I call the Nice Clean List. The Nice Clean List is essentially a master to-do list. You start a new page, date it, and add the tasks and projects you identified in your Brain Dump or Harvest, along with anything else that occurs to you while you are making the list.
I call it the Nice Clean List because it feels so good to gather all those scattered thoughts and tasks onto one clean piece of paper. But, much like my desk after a reset, it won’t stay clean for long. As time goes on, you cross off completed tasks, add notes, star priorities, and remove things that no longer seem worth doing. Every now and then, you create a new Nice Clean List and migrate only the tasks that still deserve your time and attention. That review might happen once a week or once a month, depending on the rhythm of your life.
My current Nice Clean List is digital, but it isn’t anything fancy. It’s a simple online document arranged by project, with a Someday/Maybe section at the bottom. AI can add tasks to the appropriate project, put dated events into my calendar, and put reference information I want to keep into a spreadsheet.
But even more amazing is how AI helps me before I even know what belongs on my digital Nice Clean List.
A recent example began with a data-breach letter that came in the mail. In Messy Planning terms, that letter is something I would find in a Paper Harvest, buried amidst junk mail and random vacation advertisements. Because it asked for sensitive information, including my Social Security number, I wanted to verify that the letter and the service it offered were legitimate before I responded.
I uploaded pictures of the letter (which contained nothing private) and asked AI to help me research it. Instead of doing a series of searches on my own, I just asked questions as they occurred to me: Was the breach real? What information had been exposed? Was the credit-monitoring service legitimate? What else should I do to protect myself? By the end of the conversation, I had the information I needed and asked AI to add “check credit freeze” to my Nice Clean List, along with links to the credit services.
And, notice, it put “check credit freeze” into my next tasks on a Nice Clean List that lives in the cloud. I love my paper planner, but being able to add to my next tasks from anywhere, on any device, particularly my phone, is a game-changer. (And, yes, I know there are all kinds of cross-platform task apps. But this is the first time it’s been worth it to me to jump back to a digital list.)
Another, more homey example began with a succulent bouquet my husband gave me for my birthday. Succulents are basically the friendlier, less-stabby cousins of cacti, and the pot contained a dozen or so different ones I loved, but couldn’t identify. All I knew was that they were crowded in their pot and needed to be repotted.
On my own, “repot plants” might have been the next action I put on the Nice Clean List, but that would have jumped many steps ahead of what I was actually capable of implementing. I didn’t know what the plants were, what kind of soil they needed, whether they should stay together, what size pots I needed, or what kind of light they required.
In the Messy Planner, I suggest that when you don’t know how to get from an idea to a finished project, you start by identifying “what you will need to do and what questions you will need to answer in order to complete the project.” I also wrote, “Talking through a plan is a helpful way to find clarity.”
That is essentially what I did with the succulents. After many conversations with AI, uploading photos, identifying the plants, and determining what kind of soil, pots, and light each one needed, we added The Great Succulent Repotting project to my online list, with a shopping trip for pots and soil as the first action. Today, those plants are happily ensconced under a grow light in my reading corner, and all the boxes for that project are checked off on the Nice Clean List.
I still use Brain Dumps, Harvests, and the Nice Clean List much the way I described them in the Messy Planning system. AI just gives me another way to get there. I can talk through a half-formed idea while I’m driving, upload a picture of something that needs attention (where it can sit patiently until I’m ready to deal with it), or start with, “I know I need to do something about this, but I don’t know what.”
I don’t have to turn the mess into a task before I capture it. I can start with the mess.
