Introduction
Welcome to the Coaching Hive podcast! I am thrilled that you’re here today because today is all about getting your ideas down on paper so that you can get things done. If you know anything about being an entrepreneur, and I’m sure you do, because even if you’re a brand new entrepreneur, you know that getting things done is the secret sauce to having a successful business.
But let’s face it, it’s so easy for all of the ideas to just get jumbled, to feel that overwhelm, not know where to start, and a brain dump is probably the simplest, cheapest, fastest way to start making progress in your business, and that is what we are going to talk about today. So if you are ready to start making a difference in your business, getting things done, taking that next step, let’s jump in.
Productivity and the Brain Dump
All right, so you are an entrepreneur, and like most entrepreneurs, you have a lot of ideas. Let’s face it, you have shower ideas, you have ideas when you’re cooking, you have ideas. When you are driving, the ideas just keep coming and coming and coming, and they’re all pretty good. But the problem comes when you try to implement things. If you have all of these different ideas swirling around ready to go, it is difficult to get anything done because you don’t know what to do first. This is where a brain dump makes things so much simpler.
Now, it’s not like an easy button, but it’s almost as good as an easy button. Y’all remember those buttons that you could push? I think it was Staples that had the easy button. So a brain dump is a way to increase your productivity. To be honest, a brain dump is a way to get all of your thoughts, all of your ideas that are floating around in your head, down onto paper, and what happens as a result is that you are clearing your mind, you’re decluttering your thoughts, and you can focus on one thing the next thing in your business because when you are an entrepreneur, you also tend to have a lot of other things going on in your life.
Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, you have a lot of things going on in your life, and having all of those ideas held in your brain makes it really difficult to focus on the most important thing right now, and that’s why a brain dump is so helpful and it’s so simple to implement. In fact, it’s not going to cost you anything. You can pull out the nearest sheet of paper, the closest pen or pencil, and set a timer for 15 minutes.
That’s what’s going to cost you. It’s going to cost you a piece of paper, a pen, and 15 minutes.
Now, I want you to look at your business and think about what you spend on applications, technology, different tools, resources, and courses. This brain dump piece of paper, pen and 15 minutes is a worthy investment in your business and your life in general.
So how do you do a brain dump and why does it really increase your productivity?
What happens is you take your piece of paper, you’re going to set your timer for 15 minutes, and I want you to find a quiet time of day in a quiet space. This may be more challenging for some of you than others. I understand that, but it’s well worth the effort to find the 15 minutes of quiet space and quiet time. Then what I want you to do is write every idea down that you’ve had for your business. That’s it. I want you to write every idea down that you’ve had, that you’ve been thinking about contemplating for your business.
Maybe it’s podcast ideas, blog ideas. Perhaps it’s a new revenue stream. Maybe it is how to change your messaging. Maybe it is a new place to reach out for potential clients, a new lead magnet idea. I just want you to write it all down.
Don’t edit. Don’t worry about if it’s a good idea, a not great idea for right now. Maybe it’s down the road. I don’t want you to do any of that. Just want you to write down all the things that you’ve been thinking about. No grammar, police, no spelling, police.
Just get it all down, and then this is where you can do a couple of different things. I’m a sticky note girl. Some of you already know this, so you could take sticky notes and write all of your ideas down into sticky notes. Go to your nearest empty wall or table and start organizing the ideas into themes.
For example, I have a podcast obviously, so I might organize all of my podcast ideas into a podcast idea pile, and then I might have ideas for the new membership that I’m working on. I might put all of those ideas together on the table or on a wall, and I might put all of the ideas for a new revenue stream or a new lead magnet or a way to reach out or a place to reach out. I might put all those together. You can organize them because then what starts to happen is you gain a little bit of clarity as to where you are headed as an entrepreneur, where your business is headed, and you can start to say, all right, I know I need to focus here right now. Here are all of the ideas I had on this concept, let me prioritize, and you can set the other stuff aside because you no longer have to remember it. This is why it increases productivity.
Our brains aren’t good at multitasking. If you are holding all of your ideas in your brain and they’re running on a loop so that you don’t forget anything and you are trying to also complete an important task, you are now multitasking. You will be faster, you will be more effective if you can brain dump all of the ideas now, you don’t have it going on a loop and just focus on the one thing that’s important right now, you will do that faster, so more efficiently and more effectively. Pretty cool for the price of a piece of paper, a pen in 15 minutes.
You can actually work faster, smarter, better on your tasks. So this brain dump helps to increase productivity because you are now able to focus on one thing at a time. It’s so hard to focus when you have a lot of ideas swirling, you get everything down on paper, you can start to process each thought one at a time. It will help you to find the focus that you want in your business and get more done.
This is something that you should do regularly. In fact, this is something that I encourage all of our Coaching Hive Elite members to do quarterly so that they’ve got great quarterly goals, but they also have all of the ideas written down. Then I encourage you to revisit this monthly, and for some of you, it might be a weekly task in the beginning, or even always as you set your weekly goals and things to get done, you might consider doing a brain dump of all of the things that you want to get done.
The brain dump can be used for a lot of different purposes, but ultimately, it all comes back to increasing your productivity, helping you find the next thing to focus on and get it done, and that’s the magic of the brain dump. So I’m hoping right now you’re kind of on board. You’re thinking, yeah, for a piece of paper, a pen in 15 minutes. This sounds like a good experiment to try, which leads me to our action item for the week.
Action Item
You guessed it. I want you to do a brain dump and set that timer for 15 minutes.
Write everything down that you’ve been considering thinking about, want to do, want to accomplish, and then take the next step. Organize it into themes or pods of information so that you can say, okay, I know I’ve got a new blog that I want to start up, and I had a lot of different ideas that I could write about here they all are. Let me put them in the order. I think I want to write them in. Look at that now. Not only have you made progress on your blog, you have ideas solidified and you have an order that you’d like to publish those ideas in, and then you can start writing. You know what to start writing from the first topic instead of wondering what topic to write about; that’s your action item.
Do your brain dump and then start organizing it so that you can choose the next step in your business and get things done.
Conclusions
We covered just a little bit here today, but mighty things come in small packages. The brain dump is one of those things. It comes in a very small package, but it is incredibly mighty and powerful.
I hope that you are going to take this action item to heart and do it this week. I want to see those lists. I want to see those brainstorms. Take a picture, post it in Instagram stories or Facebook stories. Tag me. Let me see what those lists look like and how you felt once you got it all down on paper.
The goal of the brain dump is to increase productivity, and what entrepreneur doesn’t want better productivity? Because here’s the thing, in a nine-to-five job, you have to work nine to five. But as an entrepreneur, if you can get the work done, say nine to noon, then you can live life to the fullest even more. Then noon to five when you would have been in your day job you get to go experience new things. You get to spend more time with your family. You get to pick up a new hobby or a creative outlet. You get to do more things or take time to just be quiet and be in the moment.
So why not get everything done in the nine to noon instead of nine to five? This brain dump can help you move toward achieving that reality.
There you have it. Just a quick overview of how to use a brain dump to increase your productivity. Give it a try this week or any time that you’re feeling overwhelmed or you feel like you’re experiencing a shift or a pivot in your business, use this brain dump to organize your thoughts and see what magic it holds for you.
I’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Coaching Hive Podcast, where a focus on mentoring and community and implementation removes the overwhelm of building your successful and profitable business and adds in a dose of momentum.
Until next time, have a healthy, safe, and happy week.
