I made a super simple workflow for turning brain dumps into an actual to-do list.
I’m pretty bad at stopping what I’m doing to properly organize tasks, so throughout the day I’ll usually just record a voice note with everything that’s in my head. Stuff like “email John back, book dentist, need to send that invoice, check flights for next weekend” etc.
I upload the voice note to ChatGPT and use:
“Turn this brain dump into a clean to-do list. Don’t add anything that I didn’t mention. Group similar tasks together and flag anything that sounds urgent or time-sensitive.”
Then I normally follow up with:
“Now order these by what I should probably do first. Put anything that takes less than 5 minutes near the top.”
Sometimes I’ll also ask:
“Which of these can I realistically finish in the next hour?”
It’s nothing fancy but I use it all the time. The nice thing is I don’t have to organize my thoughts before getting them out of my head.
In action
