Andrew Hoxsey | Ram | find site | oil change | VP

No, you don't forget. You just remember at the wrong time. As Allen says, the mind knows nothing of past or present or context or timing. It just knows that you should be doing something right now, all the time, about all this stored-up stuff. So you remember the oil change - when you're teeing off. You remember the unfinished PowerPoint presentation - at three a.m. The mind, bold creator of philosophy and politics, elegant designer of cathedrals and rockets, is no better than a drunken monkey when it's forced to act as a reminder system juggling 300 pieces of stuff. Hence the ­Allen mantra: "If it's on your mind, it's probably not getting done."

That's why GTD begins with getting things off your mind through a RAM dump or mind sweep. When he attended his first Allen seminar in the late 1980s, Andrew Hoxsey was told to write down all of his "incompletions" before the second day of class. He started writing in the afternoon. And writing. And writing...

"There I was in the hotel, so wrapped up in the process," Hoxsey recalls. "It's midnight, and I'm still working through these open loops. My wife said, 'Turn out the light!' So I went in the bathroom and sat there until the sun came up, writing down all these things I hadn't collected anywhere else. It was such a catharsis."

A full-fledged RAM dump, performed in the office or at home, requires hauling out all the stuff that's choking your psychic RAM and getting it into one collection point - a desktop in-box, for example. If it's a conference invitation, toss it in. Confusing memo from a VP? In. Training-film script you promised to critique last year? In. If the stuff isn't physical (e.g., you need to find a new site for the family reunion), write "find site for reunion" on a piece of paper and put it in. Same thing if the stuff is too big or bulky, like that file drawer filled with Clinton-era invoices. Write "review and purge invoices" and add it to the stack.