The mental load of running something is rarely one big problem. It is 40 small open loops, all paging you at once, at 11 at night. Ring the supplier. That email. The pricing thing. Mum's birthday. Whether the insurance actually covers that.
Your head is a terrible place to store those and a worse place to sort them. It cannot hold 40 things, so it cycles through 6 of them repeatedly and lets the other 34 surprise you later.
Triage splits the job in 2, and the split is what makes it work.
You do the dumping. Everything, any order, half sentences, work and personal mixed, no organising as you go. Organising while dumping is exactly the overhead that stops people emptying their head at all.
The AI does the sorting. Every item filed, with the next step attached where there is one.
The triage prompt
I am going to empty my head. Below is everything on my mind, unsorted, work and personal mixed together.
Sort every single item into 4 lists:
ACTIONS. Things with a concrete next step. Write the next step, not the topic. Flag anything that would take under 2 minutes. DECISIONS. Things stuck waiting on a choice. Name the actual choice each one is stuck on, in one line. IDEAS. Things worth keeping but not now. Park them. NOISE. Things that need nothing from me. Tell me why, briefly.
Rules: do not drop a single item, even the vague ones. If an item is too unclear to file, put it under a fifth heading called UNCLEAR and ask me what I meant. Do not add anything I did not say. Do not reassure me.
Then tell me the one action and the one decision that deserve attention first, and why.
Here it is: [dump everything]
3 parts of that are doing more work than they look.
"Write the next step, not the topic." The difference between "insurance" and "ring the broker and ask whether the trailer is covered" is the difference between an item that sits there for a month and one that gets done.
"Name the actual choice." Most stuck things are stuck because the decision has never been stated. Half of them unstick the moment somebody writes down what you are choosing between.
"Do not drop a single item." Without this it will tidy your list into a shorter, neater list, and the thing you were most avoiding is exactly the vague half-sentence it will quietly drop.
Constructed example. A physio clinic owner's dump of 9 items, trimmed.
ACTIONS. Ring the landlord about the aircon (under 2 minutes, do it now). Reply to the new patient enquiry from Saturday, next step is to offer 2 specific times rather than asking when suits. Chase the health fund rebate query, next step is to find the claim number.
DECISIONS. Hiring a second physio. The actual choice you are stuck on is not "should I hire" but "am I willing to work Saturdays for another 6 months if I do not". Answer that and the rest follows.
IDEAS. The Pilates classes. Parked.
NOISE. The printer. You have already ordered the toner, it arrives Thursday, there is nothing to do. Written down, it stops paging you.
UNCLEAR. You wrote "the thing with Sam". What is that?
First action: ring the landlord. First decision: the Saturdays question, because the hiring one has been on your list 3 weeks and it is the actual blocker.
What to do next, which is not obvious
The sort is the relief. It is not the outcome. 3 follow-ups, all optional, all short.
Clear the 2-minute flags immediately. Before you do anything else. It is usually 4 or 5 items and it takes 8 minutes, and the effect on how the pile feels is out of all proportion to the effort.
Turn the actions into a real plan:
Take the ACTIONS list. I have got [how many hours, realistically] this week. Tell me what fits, what does not, and what I should schedule for when. Be honest if it does not all fit.
Unstick one decision:
Take [the decision]. Ask me the 3 questions that would settle it. Do not give me a pros and cons list, I have had one of those in my head for a month.
The questions work better than the list, because the list is what you have already been doing.
Whatever is left after that is tomorrow's problem, and it is exactly what the morning briefing is for: the triage empties your head, the briefing decides what today is for.
When to run it
When the feeling arrives, not on a schedule. You know the one: too many tabs, everything half-started, a low hum of having forgotten something.
Sunday evening, if the dread is a weekly event rather than an occasional one.
Before a break. An hour before you finish for a week off, dump everything. You will not lose the loops and you will stop rehearsing them on the beach.
Make this prompt yours
Empty your head straight into the box. Nothing you type leaves this page.
Where triage runs out
It cannot triage what you did not type. The thing you are most avoiding is the thing you will most reliably leave out, because leaving it out is what avoiding is. If you finish a dump and feel oddly fine, check whether the big one made it in.
Sorting is not doing. A beautifully filed list of 40 things you do not action is a nicer-looking version of the same problem. The 2-minute items are the guard against this: clearing 5 things immediately means the session produced something.
Leaving the personal out breaks it. People do this because it feels unprofessional to put the dentist next to the BAS. They are competing for the same head. Triage them together or the sort is fiction.
It will occasionally file something wrong. Its idea of noise might be your idea of urgent. Move it and say so; within a project it will remember.
It is not for the heavy stuff. If what is on your mind is money you cannot pay or a relationship falling apart, a 4-pile sort is the wrong instrument. Get it out of your head by all means, and then talk to a person.
4 minutes, no tidying
Set a timer for 4 minutes and type without stopping or tidying. Whatever is in your head at the end of 4 minutes is the dump. Paste the prompt above it and send.