I’ve been doing this thing all my life, but I’ve only recently heard it referred to as a ‘thought download’.

Where you just write everything down on a list to get it out of your head and onto paper. Then you can properly evaluate it.

My favourite way to do a thought download is to imagine that I’m with a team of experts in a board room meeting (if you’ve seen the TV show The Politician, it’s kind of like that in my head).

They can take care of everything for me.

I can offload anything to them. They will fix it and make suggestions that my own self wouldn’t normally come up with. I think “Right, Gerry, over to you. What do you suggest we do about the ‘staying-up-too-late’ issue?”

And I’ll get perspectives from imaginary experts and I’ll make an executive decision.

“Right, we’re going with Barbara’s idea of scheduling everything down to tiny details, and we’ll meet back here in 3 days to evaluate and rehash the whole thing.”

This isn’t new to me. I’ve been doing it automatically every day since I was a kid. I thought every few hours everyone just stopped, evaluated the last few hours of thoughts, figured out how they fit into the puzzle of life, and then filed them into a mental library to deal with at the next board meeting.

And since articulating it, no one else I’ve met says they do this.

How do you process your thoughts? I’d love to know.