Finding Your Inside Time

An old article that worth to mention is called Finding Your Inside Time by David Allen.

David talks about his style on capturing your life details to journal. By writing every action required items into your journal, you will have more freedom from detaching yourself from all those pressures. He says journal is like a core dump which can act as your stress release and spiritual in-basket:

Just making a free-form list of all the things you have attention on is a form of journaling and is at least momentarily liberating. On the most mundane level, it is capturing all of the “oh, yeah, I need to …” stuff—phone calls to make, things to get at the store, things to talk to your boss or your assistant about, etc. At this level, it doesn’t usually make for a very exciting or interesting experience—just a necessary one to clear the most obvious cargo on the deck.

I often use my journal for “core-dumping” the subtler and more ambiguous things rattling around in my psyche. It’s like doing a current-reality inventory of the things that really have my attention—the big blips on my internal radar. These can be either negative or positive, like relationship issues, career decisions or unexpected events that have created disturbances or new opportunities. Sometimes core-dumping is the best way to get started when nothing else is flowing—just an objectification of what is on my internal landscape.

This is a key point that David has emphasized in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – and it is one of the effective tools that I use daily.

Finding Your Inside Time – [Writers Digest]