How to Do a Brain Dump with ADHD

Some days I sit down at the desk and cannot do anything. Not because there is no work to do, but the opposite. Fifteen things are spinning in my head at once, and each of them steps forward in turn and says "me first."

Trying to work in that state has never worked for me. For a long time I forced myself with "let me pull myself together," and it did not happen. The only thing that did happen was this: getting what was in my head out.

This article is about why that simple move works so well and how I do it.

What it is

A brain dump is pouring whatever is in your mind somewhere without putting it in any order.

The rules are few and strict:

• No ordering. "Bill due date" and "I have to fix that sentence" stand side by side.
• No categories. Work, home, health, feelings; all of them go on the same page.
• No judgment. No screening with "this is silly, not worth writing." If it is in your mind it gets written, because that is exactly what is taking up room in your mind.
• No solutions. While writing you solve nothing. The moment you start solving, the dump stops and you fall into a single item.

Paper or screen, both work. I like paper, because when writing on a screen the chance of switching tabs is always right there. But there is no single right tool; the tool within reach is the best one.

The aim of a dump is not to build order. It is to see for the first time what is inside your head.

Why it relieves so quickly

Two separate mechanisms work at once here, and telling them apart helps.

Room opens up. Working memory is a limited space and in ADHD the performance of this space comes out weaker (Kofler et al., 2010). Every item you hold in mind eats a piece of that space. An item written outside leaves the space and leaves a gap behind it. Part of what I call "my scatteredness" is actually this: nothing new fits because the space is full.

The loop closes. The study by Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) shows something nice: an unfinished job's occupying the mind does not diminish only by finishing the job; making a concrete plan for it provides the same relief. So the mind is looking for an answer to the question "will this job be done," not to the question "has this job been done." Writing is the first form of that answer.

Separating the two taught me this: the reason for the relief is not that I am dealing with the jobs. I feel relief although I have not dealt with any of them. At first this felt a bit like cheating; then I understood that the load was not the jobs themselves but the effort of keeping them in mind.

How I do it

1. I set the time. Fifteen minutes. I tried doing it without a timer; either I quit at five minutes or it goes on for an hour and eats the rest of the day.

2. I just write. Jobs to do, worries, things I need to say to someone, things to buy, a sentence that stuck in my mind. No order, no beauty of sentence.

3. When I get stuck I wait. In the first five minutes the easy ones finish and the feeling of "that's all there is" comes. That feeling is misleading. When the pen stops and I wait five seconds, what comes from behind is usually the really heavy things: the conversation I put off, the envelope I have not opened, the question I shrank from asking.

4. When the time ends I stop. I do not start organizing. Organizing is a separate job, and if it is done at that moment the dump is left half done.

5. The next day I sort. I split the list into three: to do, to wait for, rubbish. The rubbish category turns out bigger than I thought almost every time. Some of the things that weigh in my head show, once written down, that they were not really jobs that needed doing.

6. I move what is left to a single list. The single list rule comes into play here. The dump page does not become a warehouse, it becomes a crossing. If the page stays there it turns into a new open loop.

When to do it

Once a week, on a fixed day. The regular one gives the best result. Doing it as the first step of the weekly review reduces two jobs to one sitting.

When you are stuck. In moments when you cannot start any job, the reason is often not the difficulty of the job but the crowd in your head. I covered the other face of not being able to start in the article on task paralysis.

When you cannot sleep. In the study by Scullin and colleagues (2018), people who wrote a to-do list before bed fell asleep faster than those who wrote about completed tasks. What spins in my head at night is always the same: "don't forget this tomorrow." When I write it on paper, the task of not forgetting passes to the paper. It is not the whole of the matter of going to bed late, of course, but this part is a cheap intervention.

Before a big job. A big job I start without clearing my mind keeps getting interrupted by small thoughts cutting in.

Write the feelings too. A brain dump does not have to be only a to-do list. A subject that bothers you also takes up room in your mind. Once the sentence "I said something stupid in that meeting yesterday" is written, its going round and round is reduced.

When the page looks frightening

The first time I did it, the list that came out did not make me feel good. Thirty-odd items, most of them things that had been sitting there for months. "So I really am sunk," I thought.

Then I noticed this: those thirty items existed before I wrote them. The only difference was that they were visible. Thirty items you cannot see are heavier than thirty items you can see, because to count what you cannot see you have to keep counting.

If the list comes out long, what to do is not to try to shorten the list. Picking three items the next day and setting the rest aside is enough. Three items look small; they are far bigger than zero.

What it does not solve

I have to be honest here, because articles describing methods usually skip this part.

A brain dump does not do the jobs. It only makes them visible. The relief after writing the page is real, but mistaking that relief for progress is an easy trap. With me it sometimes goes like this: I close the day with the lightness that making a list gives, and I touch nothing on the list.

Second, the crowd in the head does not always come from disorder. If there is a tiredness that has gone on for a long time, a constantly recurring anxiety or a reluctance that comes back every morning, the address for it is not paper. If such a picture continues, talking to a specialist is more useful than writing the list one more time. If you are having a hard day, there are the 112 and ALO 183 lines in Türkiye.

Common mistakes

Trying to write neatly. Writing nicely, splitting into headings and putting the items in order of importance slows the dump down. Order is the work of the next day.

Stopping halfway. The first five minutes feel like enough. The real load sits deeper and is usually hidden in the item that feels most boring to write.

Never opening the page again. A page that is not sorted adds a second guilt on top.

Trying to do it every day. I tried; I quit on the third day. Once a week held, every day did not. The strength of this method comes from its being small; the moment you enlarge it, it turns into app hunting.

I described the general picture of mental load in the article on mental load. A brain dump does not lift all of that load; it only takes the carrying off your shoulder and puts it on the table. For me even that much makes the difference on some days.