The first step in creating
a system of for personal effectiveness
is to help people capture
everything on their mind.
Emptying one's mind (specifically working memory)
of everything that is occupying space and processing power
is essential for gaining focus
on the one most important priority.
This step is often referred to as a "brain dump".
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A brain dump is the act of writing down everything that is on your mind so that you don't forget it and to clear your brain to focus on one thing instead of being distracted by many things. anniemueller.com/brain-dump
The first feature we need to build
is a way of capturing all thoughts
on one's mind.
Thankfully this is just a matter
of capturing free text (using a textarea element)
and safely storing it as text in Postgres.
Figma wireframe: https://www.figma.com/proto/WrpkKGJNYZbeCzMRDVtvQLbC/dwyl-app
We can/will evolve this text input to have rich text (formatting), autocompletion and natural language processing (to detect the kinds of items being typed). First we need to have an ultra-basic MVP working.
Please see: dwyl/app#234 for detail and acceptance criteria.
There are several tools that can be used for an initial brain dump. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.
- Basic notes app on phone/PC - good for initial capture, useless for follow up.
- Google Docs - quite good for collaborative capture, useless for next steps.
- Evernote - powerful yet incomplete, over-complicated and expensive.
- Trello - trello is great for capturing and OK for categorising but useless for completion.
Our MVP could be achieved simply by using one of these existing Apps and then focussing on the next step in the workflow. However we feel there is still a lot of work to do in the Capture stage and the UX is an integral part of the "on-boarding" for our App, so we feel that building it from scratch is essential.
Capturing a brain dump on paper or sticky notes can feel like a good step in the moment.
But unless those notes are immediately transferred to a system and categorised, most of the information is lost. We've all been there in the brain-storming / idea generating session where everyone shares their thoughts. Everyone feels great for a few moments, like real progress has been made, but in reality walls full of unorganised sticky notes is where ideas and information go to die. (sorry if that feels overly dramatic, but we have felt the frustration of both losing the individual sticky notes and the entire session due to a lack of a systematic process for storing the information)
A further downside of sticky notes is that while they are OK for colocated teams, they are useless for remote collaboration.
People often attempt to resolve this by taking a photo of the board full of sticky notes, naively thinking that they have "captured" the information. While the photo is better than nothing it creates a false sense of security because most of the time the single word on the sticky note does not capture the whole idea.