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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to get it out of your head.

That is, write down anything you're not going to do right this minute.

In a previous episode, I talked about keeping your to-do list short.

The reason to do this is that there's no point putting something on a to-do list and then not doing it. It's just as

undone as if you'd never put it on the list in the first place. Only now, you feel bad too.

Better to have expectations meet reality. The only way to guarantee that happens is to keep your

list short. I mentioned that a lot of people really resist this idea. That's because

we're responsible for more than three to five things in the universe. So what do you do with the rest

of this stuff? How do you keep it from clogging up your brain? How do you make sure you'll remember it

in the future? Well, as before breakfast listener Holly put it in an email to me, you get it out of your

head. Holly wrote in her note that while she was going through some very stressful times in her

personal life, she began writing down various images and memories that came to her, so she'd have them

somewhere, but wouldn't have to dwell on them. She later realized that this process was

useful for things beyond her ruminations. It was a good idea for managing to-do lists in general.

So now I have a small notebook, and each page has a subject line, she writes, and on that page,

I create a list of things I need to remember, things that I need to do, and things I want to do.

This takes them out of my head and into a place I can look over several times a day to see what I can

tick off. That is, when she finds herself with some extra time. She noted that these lists also

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