✦
Experiments

Brain dump to action planEverything in your head,
sorted in one pass.

A brain dump works because holding things in your head is expensive and writing them down is cheap. It stops working at the second step, where the page is now forty unsorted lines and every one of them still requires a decision before it can be done. That is the point most dumps get abandoned, and it is why the technique has a reputation for feeling good and changing nothing.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

Paste or type a few lines and they will be sorted.

Everything is worked out in this page and saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Dump without editing

One thing a line, no order, no filtering. Editing while capturing is what makes it take an hour instead of ten minutes.

2
Read the flagged lines

Anything marked vague or wish-shaped is a line you would have skipped over on Tuesday. Rewrite those.

3
Do the two-minute ones now

They are separated out for a reason. Doing them immediately is faster than any system for tracking them.

So this does the sorting pass. Every line is classified by its shape — one action, a project pretending to be an action, something that needs a date, something that is really a wish — and the vague ones are flagged rather than quietly filed, because a vague line is what stalls a list.

The classification is crude and says so. It is looking at verbs and length, not meaning. Its value is that it is instant and consistent, which is more than the pile of forty lines was.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

Start free →Everything else
✦ Questions

Brain dump to action plan, answered.

Length and verbs. Nine words or more, or a verb like rebuild, migrate or launch, and it is treated as more than one sitting. It is crude and says so — the value is that it is instant and consistent, which the unsorted pile of forty lines was not.
Because "sort out the website" is a decision wearing the costume of a task. You cannot start it on a tired Wednesday, so it survives every pass through your list until it is rewritten as the physical first step.
Everything, in any order, without editing. The editing pass is what makes people give up halfway; capture first and let the sorting happen afterwards, which is the whole point of doing it in two steps.
No. It is parsed in the page and never leaves your browser. Sending the sorted result to EvyOS is a separate, explicit step, and even then it travels in the part of a URL that browsers do not transmit.
Weekly is plenty, and it takes about ten minutes. The point is not the list but the emptying — the cost of holding forty open loops is paid continuously, and writing them down is what stops it.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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