The power of the external brain

Your brain is for thinking not storing.

You’re lying in bed at night. You need to sleep but you can’t.

A list of things keeps looping through your brain.

Maybe it’s the thing you need to do or the engagements that you have coming up.  You loop through the tasks and meetings in an exhausting game of idea Tetris trying to bring all these things into order in your brain, to line them up in some cohesive way.

You can’t sleep because you mind is a run-away train of stuff management.  Your brain is caught up in a game that it can’t win, trying to solve a problem it shouldn’t be tasked with in the first place.

In the morning you try to meditate to calm your brain.  No matter how much you try to relax and focus on the breathing, thoughts come cascading into your consciousness like wild horses.  You push one away only to have another intrude.  You finish you session, not more relaxed but perturbed that your active brain wouldn’t give you peace.

There’s your 9:00 appointment that you need to read that report for…Mother’s Day is coming up and you can’t miss that, right?…The dog needs to be washed…What is your workout for today?…is there enough gas in the car for that trip to the airport?…(because, you know how much it sucks to get home late from a flight and find the tank empty)…Did you forget to return that recruiter’s call?…Do you have enough clean underwear for this week?…Oh God, you have to find time to have THAT conversation with your kids…or your spouse…or your parents…or your employee…or your boss…

On and one it cascades like a herd of rabid and confused weasels.

Your mind is unsettled.  Because you are giving it to much work.  Because you are giving it the wrong kind of work.  Because you are asking it to do work that it isn’t good at.

What you need is an external brain.

What is an external brain?  It is simply a device or process that allows you to take things out of your brain and put them somewhere else so they don’t nibble at you all day.

Your brain is great at lots of things.  It’s great at coming up with ideas.  It’s great a solving problems.  What it’s not so good at is storing things.  More appropriately, you shouldn’t try to store everything in your brain.  When you try to store everything in your brain it becomes like a hoarder house.  You can’t find stuff and you can’t have great ideas because of all the clutter.

Have you ever tried to remember a long number?  Like a pass code?  You can do it up to 5 or 6 digits but unless you have a methodology your brain starts to struggle after 6 digits.  Have you ever tried to schedule a meeting on a busy day with 4 busy people?  What are the odds of finding an open slot that works for everyone?

This is the type of problem that you are launching into your brain without knowing it when you don’t leverage the external brain.  Your brain doesn’t know it can’t solve these problems and starts to iterate, to run algorithms, to spin out of control looking for potential solutions.

And that keeps you awake at night and intrudes into your waking consciousness.

External brains allow you to de-clutter.

External Brains allow you to remove some of these endless loop scheduling programs from your CPU.

The first example of an external brain is your list.  You need some place where you can write down your to-do’s.  Whether these are simple tasks, like ‘pay the credit card’ or more complex projects like ‘paint the house’ or ‘write the next great American novel’.

You need a system and a place to safely store these things so you don’t have to constantly think about them.

I keep mine on a piece of paper.  Every day I write down the tasks I want to accomplish. Every day I get the great joy and that little dopamine hit that comes from scratching those scribbled tasks off my list.  At the end of the day, when I run out of energy. I know what I didn’t get to and have the option to roll it over to tomorrow.

Almost every day I review my list.  I add stuff and I delete stuff.  But, I’m not slavish about it.  It doesn’t drive me it’s just a safe collection area where I can put stuff I don’t need to think about.

In the morning, or at the end of the day, I can look at my list and see how much slack I have in the day.  I can figure out how to most efficiently schedule my time to get the most stuff done.  This is especially important when I have a workout and nutrition to fit in.  This is an example of managing and scheduling interdependent activities.

Bigger, more aspirational projects I keep in a different file.  I slide these in as I need to so that they become incremental tasks within the days and weeks and eventually get done.  If I find myself with a long flight or some down-time I can review the list for likely candidates to work on.

The point is that these tasks and projects are stored in a safe place. My big brain doesn’t have to give itself hernias trying to keep them all under control.  I only have to consider them when I’m doing them or reviewing them.  Other than that they aren’t cluttering up my thinking capability.

The second very obvious example of the external brain is the schedule.  Everyone has a calendar of some sort.  Calendars are great to keep appointments, any documents associated with that appointment and even give you a 15 minute warning.

You schedule keeps your brain from having to look at your watch every ten minutes.

More interestingly, another great and useful manifestation of the external brain is a coach.  I love having a coach.  Whether for nutrition or training or life coaches don’t just bring expertise, they allow you to not have to think about the training.  They do your worrying and analytics for you.

External Brains can be processes as well.  What do I mean?

You know how much I like habits?  (Habits, not hobbits, I like hobbits too, but habits are much more useful.)  Here’s an example. I installed a cart key rack on the wall just inside the door that leads up from the garage.  Do you want to know where my keys are?  Well, right now they are actually in my computer bag, but if I was at the house they would be in that key rack.

Why? Because I don’t have to think about where my keys are! I can use that processing power for something else.  Why would you spend even 20 minutes of your life hunting for keys in your house?  Even with a life like mine that does not have a set routine I try to make habits out of the routines that I have.

Try to routine-ize as much of the rote stuff with habits and organization. Again, don’t go crazy.  There are things that shouldn’t be habits.  Like love and family.  Don’t over program your life so that the simplicity gain starts to crowd out the richness and joy.

Another example of the external brain is something that humans have always been good at – organizing into groups.   These are the people you work with.  If you manage those people correctly they become part of your external brain.

Hire people and work with people who you can leverage to meet mutual goals.  Give them responsibilities and processes so that you get the results you want without having to chase them. (If you want to make yourself crazy hire people who need to be watched and then micro-manage them.)

I’m sure if you think about it you can find other ways to create external brains so that you don’t have to carry all those bristling thoughts around with you.  Your brain isn’t meant to be a parking lot crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with pensive thoughts and run-away subroutines.

The final thing to remember is that most of the swirling thoughts that keep you awake just aren’t that important.  If you drop something nobody is going to die (unless you’re on the bomb disposal squad).

If you find yourself staring at the ceiling while your brain whirs like a blender on liquefy, you need to get some of those thought out of your mind and into an external brain.

An effective way to do this is just to have a journal of some sort available to you before you go to bed so you can write these thoughts and ideas down.  Once they are captured they are safe and your mind can let them be.

The same is true if those thoughts are intruding on your mediation.  Just have a pad of paper and write down a few one or two word reminders.  Then return to your breathing unencumbered.

Life is too short to be cluttering up your mind.  Find ways to leverage your external brains.