How to brain dump, and where it goes afterwards.

A brain dump is writing down everything on your mind, in any order, until the head is empty. It works. The part that fails is the next morning, when you are holding a page of forty lines and no idea which of them are tasks.

David Allen called the first step of Getting Things Done a mind sweep: get everything out of your head and into something you trust. Todoist and Things both build their day around the same move. Todoist has an Inbox that takes whatever you throw at it. Things has an Inbox, and the whole system hangs off emptying it. Both are good at holding the item. Neither one is where the item was born.

Why the dump stalls

I have done this on paper, in Apple Notes, in a task app, and in a blank Obsidian vault. The dump itself takes fifteen minutes and feels great. Then I look at the list.

Some lines are tasks. Some are worries. One is a phone number. Three are the same thing worded differently. Turning that into something I can act on is a second job, and it is a job I do tired, after the relief has worn off.

So the page gets closed. Two weeks later there is a dump from the 3rd and a dump from the 17th, and the unfinished business in the first one is now buried under the second.

What Remlo does with the dump

Open Remlo and today’s page is already there, cursor in it. Write.

Put a checkbox in front of anything you have to do. That line is now a to-do, collected on the To-dos page with every other one. Leave the checkbox off anything that is only a thought. It stays on the page as text.

You do not stop to sort. A dump has two kinds of lines and one keystroke tells them apart: the checkbox.

If a line needs a day, a slash command sets it to today, tomorrow, or a date you pick, right where you wrote it. Anything with a date turns up in Today. Anything without one waits on the To-dos page, and a someday flag keeps the ones you never want to see on a Monday.

On the Mac, hold the capture shortcut and talk. On the phone, press the button. The words land in Today as text. Voice is the fastest dump there is, because you can pace the kitchen while you do it.

The sort happens after, one line at a time

The old approach asks you to sort the pile. This one lets the pile sort itself while you write, and leaves one decision for later: what each to-do is for.

Later, that decision is small. You open the To-dos page and read the list of things you said you would do. You do not read the worries. You do not read the phone number. A to-do you do not want gets deleted, and a to-do that belongs to a project gets a link to the project’s page, so the project collects it.

Links in Remlo point both ways. The project page lists every day that named it, and the dump from the 3rd shows up there as one of them.

What the old tools still do better

Things is faster at the specific act of triaging an inbox. It was built around that act, and it shows. Todoist handles recurring tasks and shared projects, and Remlo is a single-player app with no sharing at all.

If your dump is mostly tasks from other people, an inbox in one of those apps fits. Remlo suits the dump that is mostly sentences: a meeting you are halfway through, a worry that turned into a plan, a list of six things you said yes to this week.

Do it once, then keep it daily

A brain dump is a good thing to do once on a Sunday. It is a better thing to never need.

When capture is always open, the dump is just the day. The page has a line from the call, a to-do typed mid-sentence, and the title of a book someone mentioned. Nothing has to be cleared because nothing piled up.

Remlo is native on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, works with no signal, and syncs through your own iCloud when a connection returns.

The list I trust most is the one I never had to sit down and write.