152-Time & Priorities: Mental Parking Lot

tf our brains were Google, then we’ve got to close all the tabs.  A mental parking lot is a perfect tool to free up our mental capacity.   

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and I wanted to share a time management course done by my friend Ryan.  I completed the course the other day, 6 quick Youtube videos.  And he has a concept in it that I’ve heard before but this time, it sounded a little different.  You know how sometimes you have to hear things over and over again and then it sticks or it finally resonates.  

 

Well this exercise was creating a mental parking lot.  I love this because I think a lot of our overwhelm comes from what’s in our head.  We’re constantly thinking about everything that we need to do now and much much later.  It’s exhausting to carry all of these todos, ideas, thoughts in our heads that spin up that mental capacity. 

 

He says, you can have a notepad or the notes on your phone to create two parking lots.  I have mine in the back of my paper planner which has some note pages.  You create headings for a short term parking lot and a long term parking lot.  The idea of splitting up your thoughts or todos in a time-frame is really interesting.  The long term parking lot is what he calls your “crock pot” the things that are simmering that definitely don’t need to be done this week, and likely even a longer timeframe, but the tab in your brain is open and we need to close it so we stop expending energy on trying to remember it.  

 

I’m curious, how do you think this would work for you?  Scientifically, Our brains were never meant to store data, they were designed to be creative and logical thinking, so it’s a terrible use of our brains to try to remember things.  I’m all in on creating a mental parking lot.  I think it will take a lot of tasks off my daily todo list that I already knew I couldn’t accomplish today and get rid of some of that clutter in my brain, like having too many tabs open on the web browser.    

 

A link to Ryan’s course, Take Control of Your Time can be found in the show notes HERE. 

 

 

 

 

 

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