Brain dump
Get everything out of the head and onto the page before organising it.
Variants
- default
Data fields
The fields a spec's page can set for this component (see switchback show brain-dump --json):
seedminutes
Grounding
Helps: when unfinished tasks keep intruding on the work, and each item gets a specific next step written beside it; in the lab, making a specific plan, not just a list, is what quietened unfinished goals (one research group)
Backfires: when items are listed with no next step, which left the goals active in the one study that tested it, and when the read-back takes what was recent for what matters most: free lists favour recently used items
- CWriting down unfinished tasks and concerns, with at least a next step for each, reduces their intrusion into attention during later work. Listing them without any plan does not.Masicampo & Baumeister (2011), Ramirez & Beilock (2011), Scullin et al. (2018)
- CWhen people freely list what they know or think about a domain, the items they list earlier and more often are the ones most salient to them.Sousa et al. (2016), Quinlan (2005)
- BKeeping task-relevant information in a stable, visible external store, rather than in working memory, improves performance on the concurrent task, at the cost of weaker memory for the offloaded content.Gilbert (2015), Storm & Stone (2015), Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011), Risko & Gilbert (2016), Meyerhoff, Grinschgl, Papenmeier & Gilbert (2021), Hesselmann (2020)