Your Brain The Inbox

In my favorite productivity framework, GTD, David Allen talks about the inbox as a place to collect and capture ideas. You capture and collect in the inbox without giving anything extra thoughts, and then you process later. The idea is that you can get your ideas out quickly and really figure out what to do with them at a different time.

Meditation is like this too. If our brain is an inbox, then it collects thoughts and ideas all day. Most of the time, the analysis and processing of those thoughts happen right as the thought occurs. 

But what if we took the GTD approach to these thoughts? A thought occurs, seemingly out of nowhere, and instead of processing or sorting it, we leave it be. Then later we come back to figure out where the thought will fit in our mental puzzle.

Time and space can help us make better decisions than we would if we were in the moment.