Everything, onto one page
Write it all down first. Sort it afterwards, or not at all.
The short version
- Get every open item out of your head and onto one page, in any order, with no categories and no priorities while you write.
- It pays when a lot of unrelated things are open at once and none of them are written down; it costs when your commitments are already in one reliable list, because then it just produces a second list to keep in step with the first.
- This is not a test and it does not measure anything about you. The length of your list says nothing except how much is currently open.
Holding a set of unrelated open items in mind is expensive, and the expense is easy to miss because it never stops. There is no moment where it spikes and announces itself. It shows up instead as a background hum: rereading the same paragraph, the small resistance before starting anything, the sense of being behind without being able to say on what.
Writing them down does not complete any of them. What it does is let you look at the whole set at once, which is the one thing you cannot do while it is in your head.
Pass one — about eight minutes
Work, study, home, people you owe a reply, the thing about the passport, the thing you have been not-thinking about. One item per line. Do not stop to decide whether something belongs here. If it occurred to you, it belongs here.
Lines so far: 0
Pass two — about four minutes
Now, and only now, three questions
Go down the list once. Most items will not move — that is expected, and it is why this pass is short. You are looking for three kinds only.
Anything with a real date goes into the calendar today, with the day and the time written down, not just the deadline. Anything waiting on someone else gets that person's name and the date you asked. Anything in the third column is finished the moment you write it there.
Where this goes afterwards
The dump is a one-off clearing, not a system. If you find yourself doing it every few days, the thing that needs attention is where new items land in the first place. Our guide One place for everything you have to remember makes that argument properly, and this sheet does not replace it.
What the setting can do
Look down the middle column. If several items are waiting on the same person or the same office, you are not holding a personal admin problem — you are holding somebody else's queue on their behalf, and doing it in your head.
That is a reasonable thing to raise, and it is easier to raise with a list in front of you: these four are with you, here are the dates I sent them, could we agree a standing reply time? Other versions that work: asking for requests to arrive by one route rather than four; asking a shared household or team to keep one visible list instead of each person remembering their own share; asking for a course or project to publish its dates at the start rather than announcing them. Each of those removes items from every list, not only yours.
If nothing changes after a few weeks of asking, that is information about the queue rather than about you.
Evidence note. That unwritten commitments cost something to carry is widely described, and most people recognise it immediately — but the specific claim, and the claim that writing them out relieves it, are not well studied. We have written this page as an observation rather than a finding, and no number attached to it anywhere is one you should trust. What is better established is the step at the end: writing down the day and time you will do a thing, rather than only that you will, has a reliable effect on whether it happens. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006, pooled 94 studies and found a medium-to-large effect. That is why the dated column comes with an instruction about the calendar.
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Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.