Mind Sweep Time (Errands, Communications, Community, Connections)
We’re continuing our article series on mind sweeping. To accompany this article, you’ll want to download this set of prompts that will have you thinking about errands you need to run, communications you need to have, community involvement that you’re connected to, as well as other connections you have. You may have already thought of something by simply reading the first paragraph of the article.
There are a wide variety of prompts here to tickle your brain and let you find some of those hidden items that are snuggled down in a various parts of your mind.
As before, you may write directly on pages 24, 25, or 26, but it’s probably better to take whatever comes to mind when you think of something and put it right on one of your cards or into your Workflowy or other container for swept items.
Let me give you a few ideas with these prompts; let’s start with Communications, which is page 24. This is a very broad category and I included quite the range of prompts here. For a few of these, they may prompt their own sublist. For example, let’s say, “Cards” jogs some ideas for you. Maybe you write “Cards” on your index card and add the names of some people or some holidays related to cards, too.
The Community/Connections set is also quite far-ranging. Be ready to see what comes up for you. And if there are some items that really don’t mean anything to you now and you don’t think they ever will, then you could just cross it off. Note: I’d err on the side of not crossing things off, but sometimes, there really are ones that just don’t have anything in the world to do with you or your life.
Errands… you’ll see that I provided a link at the bottom for one of my articles about hiring a personal assistant. Errands are a wonderful job to give to a personal assistant and potentially can give you back hours every week. And if one personal assistant isn’t enough, hire two! You want to make sure that if you are the one running errands, that they are the kind that really require YOU vs. require someone (not you) to take care of the errand for you.
And the last key idea I want to mention here, and this is quite significant, actually…
As you’re working on this set of prompts or any of the others, whenever something comes popping into your head that you need to do, need to find, or need to take care of — and it has nothing to do with any of the prompts you’re looking at — simply write it down and keep going. It’s fabulous when this starts to happen and it will keep happening more and more the further you go into your mind sweeping session.
Once you start stirring things up and loosening the mental clutter, more and more gets released. It’s a lot like when you have a snarly set of cords or Christmas lights or something. It’s almost impossible to start getting them untangled until you finally get one of them loosened. Once one of them is out, the next one is easier and then the next and the next.
Think about your mind sweep as doing that very thing. It’s potentially pretty tangly in there but once you start to get things untangled, it gets more and more likely to keep untangling.
Be ready to write fast as you go through this. It will pour out more and more quickly and you want to capture what’s coming.
It’s all good, folks.
Invest some time thinking about these three sets of prompts and then whenever you are ready for a new set, be on the lookout for another article. We aren’t running out of prompts anytime soon, never you fear!
I think I’ll go some sweeping, too!
And remember the rainbow, i.e., the symbol for the “arc” of how this process goes and how you’re feeling as you go through the process.
