Easy advice to give, tricky to implement. Sometimes it’s effective, sometimes it’s a wash. Like rearranging for the sake of rearranging. But when it is effective, it creates mental space. And sharpens the skill of editing.

I have entirely too many items in entirely too many lists. De facto backlogs. Watch laters, read laters, tasks, notes with “TK marks”, boards holding dozens of ideas that would be nice to flesh out, someday…

All those “maybe somedays” present a non-trivial mental burden. Is today the right day for one of them? Will these lists ever get shorter? … Were it only that just the right action, supporting material, and mindset arrived all at the same time!

– Mind (and trim) your backlogs

This is about organizing and cutting, not productivity. It may sound like weird tricks for squeezing the last bit out of every hour, but it’s not. It’s about developing the ability to do more of the good stuff so you can keep energy in reserve for when it matters.

A lot of the thinking about how to maintain a great system of lists, tasks, emails, notes and supporting material is crafting a DO NOT ERASE system for that one Truly Awesome Idea. Trouble is, they save too many Just Okay Ideas that crowd out the Truly Awesome Ideas.

Our brains have so many ways to erase an idea. Sleep consolidates memories, sometimes indiscreetly. We say something true or brilliant but have to move on to the next calendar event or get back to our routine before we can write it down. Or we simply walk through a door. Suddenly the idea is gone. Memory consolidation is our brain’s editing process. And mostly, it works!

Offloading mental burden to lists is a great hack, on balance. But develop and sharpen your brain’s natural forgetting process too. Every idea can’t be a winner.