David Allen on the Power of Brainstorming

Boost your thinking with "cognitive artifacts"

Photo by FORTYTWO on Unsplash

“The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn’t have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It’s as if your mind were to say, “Look, I’m only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you’re not collecting them in some trusted way, I won’t give you that many. But if you’re actually doing something with the ideas—even if it’s just recording them for later evaluation—then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another,” etc.

Psychologists have now labeled this and similar processes “distributed cognition.” It’s getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats—building an “extended mind.” But my English teacher in high school didn’t have to know about the theory to give me the key: “David,” he said, “you’re going to college, and you’re going to be writing papers. Write all your notes and quotes on separate three-by-five-inch cards. Then, when you get ready to organize your thinking, just spread them all out on the floor, see the natural structure that emerges, and figure out what’s missing. Mr. Edmundson was teaching me a major piece of the natural planning model!

Few people can hold their focus on a topic for more than a couple of minutes without some objective structure and tool or trigger to help them. Pick a big project you have going right now and just try to think of nothing else for more than thirty seconds. This is pretty hard to do unless you have a pen and paper in hand and use one of those “cognitive artifacts” as the anchor for your ideas. Then you can stay with it for hours. That’s why good thinking can happen while you’re working on a computer document about a project, mind mapping it on a notepad, doodling about it on a paper tablecloth, or just having a meeting about it with other people in a room that allows you to hold the context (a whiteboard with nice wet markers really helps there, too).”

— David Allen