The Mind Sweep helps you collect all the tasks, ideas, and loose ends occupying your attention. This way, these things go from your head to the inbox of your system, so you can clarify and organize them later. Your mind feels lighter, and your system becomes more reliable because everything that matters is in it.

You should do a Mind Sweep when you’re first building your organizing system. After that, you should repeat it regularly — and especially in two situations: (1) when your system hasn’t been maintained for a while and you start to feel things slipping, and (2) if you feel like you’ve fallen off the wagon.

This tool helps you do a guided Mind Sweep whenever you need it, and offers two key advantages:

• You can customize the list of incompletion triggers to fit your own situation.
• Your entries for each trigger are saved, so you can spread the Mind Sweep across several sessions — even over a week.

Doing a Mind Sweep

You can find the Mind Sweep option in the Reflect menu:

The process is very simple. Choose a trigger from the list on the left, read it, and then write down whatever comes to mind. When you click “Capture X items,” your entries will go straight to your Inbox.

If nothing comes to mind for a trigger, click “Nothing to capture here”. That marks the trigger as having zero items.

Keep choosing triggers and writing down whatever comes to mind until nothing else surfaces. If you find there’s a lot to capture and it starts feeling overwhelming, you can spread the Mind Sweep over a few days. When you come back, you’ll see which triggers you’ve already used — as long as it’s within seven days.

The trigger list

The GTD®-recommended incompletion trigger list is provided, but you can adapt it however works best for you.

You can add new triggers that are interesting to you using the “Add Trigger” button (1) and edit any triggers already created with the “Edit” button (2).

Revise each trigger’s prompt to use words or questions that feel more meaningful to you, and delete any that don’t resonate (3).