the 90-second brain dump that got the week out of my head
the voice memo i do when my brain hands me the whole list at once
it’s 8:40 at night, i’m standing in my kitchen holding a dish towel i forgot i picked up, staring at nothing, because my brain just handed me the full list at once. the dentist thing. the field trip cash that’s due. we’re almost out of diaper cream. her shoes don’t fit. i never texted back about the birthday party. it’s tuesday’s turn for class snack, or maybe wednesday. and the meeting i moved to make room for the pediatrician is now sitting on top of the call i can’t move.
none of it is on paper. all of it is in my head. and that, right there, is the actual job nobody ever put on a calendar, the holding of all of it, the part with no start time and no end that never makes it onto anyone’s list but mine.
for a long time i thought the answer was a better planner. a cuter notebook. a new app with a free trial i’d abandon by thursday. but a planner was never the issue. the list lives in my head, gets longer all day, and i’m the only one who can see it. writing it down by hand just gave me a second place to feel behind.
here’s what i actually do now, and it takes 90 seconds.
sunday night, after the kids are down, i open the voice memo app and i just talk. no structure, no order, no trying to sound organized. i brain dump out loud everything rattling around. the appointments, the half-thoughts, the “oh i need to,” the things i’m dreading, the random “did i ever.” i talk until my head feels a little quieter. usually that’s about a minute and a half.
then i paste it into claude with one prompt, and this is the whole thing:
“here’s a voice memo of everything in my head for the week. sort it into: things with a deadline (and what the deadline is), things i can hand off to someone else, things that are actually a 5-minute task hiding as a big scary thing, and things i can drop entirely. then give me the three that actually matter this week and tell me to ignore the rest.”
that’s it. it takes the pile in my head and hands it back as four short lists and a “here are your three.” the deadlines are flagged so nothing sneaks up on me. the hand-off pile is already separated, so when my husband asks what he can take, i don’t have to translate the mess in my head into a sentence, i just send him the list. and half of what felt enormous turns out to be a five-minute thing i was carrying around like a boulder.
the notebook never worked because by 8:40 on a sunday my brain can’t sort anymore, it can only pile higher. the sorting is the part i hand off now. i talk it out, claude sorts it, and i decide what actually matters. the deciding is the only part that has to be me.
and there’s another thing that happens. when i see the whole week laid out where i can actually count it, i get the first real proof that i’m not imagining how much this is. it’s a real, countable pile of work that nobody ever wrote down, and the number is always bigger than i think. that’s the job that never made it onto a list, and seeing it counted is the closest thing to relief i’ve found.
i do this every sunday now. some weeks the list is 4 things, some weeks it’s 19. either way it’s out of my head and onto a screen in under two minutes, and i walk into the week knowing the three that matter instead of carrying all nineteen at once.
if you try one thing from me this week, try that. talk for 90 seconds, paste it in, ask it to sort and pick your three. tell me what your number was.
erin
p.s. prime day’s live this week, and the only things going in my cart are the ones that take something off this exact list, the stuff that buys back time or quiets the noise. i grouped the real ones by room in my storefront here. and if the line that got you was “the number is always bigger than i think,” that’s the whole idea behind the mental load performance review, the 10 minutes that shows you on paper how much you’re actually carrying.
I love the prompt!