The Mind Sweep is the process of capturing all the things in your life that have your attention. This way, these things go from your head to the inbox of your system, so that they can be clarified and conveniently organized later. Your head is freed and your management system improves because it contains everything that matters to you.

The Mind Sweep is something you must do when starting to implement a new organizational system. Then you should do it with some regularity, and also in certain specific situations: (1) after a period in which, for whatever reason, your system has not been properly updated and you have lost some control and, (2) of course, when you have completely fallen off the wagon.

This tool will help you perform the Mind Sweep in a guided way whenever you need it, with two important advantages:

• You can customize the list of incompletion triggers and adapt it to your reality.
• The captures made with each trigger are memorized so that you can carry out the mind sweep in several sessions and on different days (for example, throughout a week).

Doing a Mind Sweep

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

The process is very simple. Select any trigger in the list on the left, read its contents, and write down everything that comes to mind. Clicking on “Capture X items” will send the list of captures to your Inbox.

If you do not have anything pending in relation to a certain trigger, click on “Nothing to capture here”. This leaves the trigger marked with zero captured items.

Continue selecting triggers and capturing things until you can’t think of anything else to capture. If you have a lot of things pending and the process becomes burdensome, you can spread the mental sweep over several days. When you return to this option you will see the triggers you have already used marked (as long as they have not been more than 7 days).

The trigger list

You’ll find the recommended incompletion trigger list in the GTD® methodology, but you can customize it your way.

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).

Update the description of any trigger with more meaningful words or questions that are more suggestive to you, and remove triggers that don’t make sense to you (3).