Mind organization is a very powerful technique to reduce stress, become more successful, and strengthen your thinking power. Organized minds are simply more efficient.
Why would I want to organize my mind?
Do you have a closet or maybe a junk drawer with a lot of clutter? If not you may already be organized, but for the rest of us we all have some form of clutter in our lives we can relate to. The mind works essentially the same way. If you have a closet full of junk that is completely unorganized it might take you a little while to find something you haven’t used lately. You may never find it at all.
In a clean and organized closet you could probably go right to the exact spot were that item is, find it, use it, and put it back where it goes so you can find it next time. Having an organized living space makes for a stress free and easy to keep up with lifestyle. Now what if you could take those same principles and apply them to your thoughts?
Thoughts are just like any closet you have. They have a certain place where they go once you think them. They go in a place and get many different labels and references for you to easily find them later. Where you store them and how your labeling system works is referred to as mind organization.
An organized mind will have a much easier and quicker time pulling out these thoughts, memories, skills, etc. This makes your mind much more efficient and increases the speed at which you think. This combined with several other good reasons makes it the ample opportunity to improve your brains thinking power.
Sounds good, so how do I organize my mind?
The first rule of being organized is “Everything has a place.” This same rule applies to your mind and thoughts in it. If you learn to put thoughts were they need to go, then they will be easily referred to later on.
I know the first thing you saying is “How do I do that, I can’t physically move my thoughts?” Thoughts don’t have to be physically moved to be put in there place. Just thought about differently.
Did you ever sing a silly little song or make a silly little reference to remember something? If you did you might understand how this is going to work a little bit better. If not I’m going to give you something to remember right now.
“Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying!” – Crying babies can’t chew gum or they wouldn’t be crying?
That silly phrase and the phrase that follows it might strike you as simply dumb. That’s OK. I’ll bet if I ask you to tell me how to not cry while cutting onions you would reference “chew gum.”
The reason is that you gave importance to the phrase because it struck you as different. The reference struck you as dumb or maybe just silly. By paying so much attention to that thought you filed it nice and neatly under the important tag in your brains massive library.
The trick here is to learn to classify all the different thoughts into categories, assign tags, pay attention to things you want to remember, etc. and discard the rest as useless. If you tell yourself that something is useless you mind will disregard it and save it’s thinking power for things more important.
A great technique to classify thoughts is to say the tag you want to classify something to in your head. For example if you wanted to think of something as important as soon as you think the thought say the word important in your mind. This will start the labeling process. Start doing this to all of your thoughts putting more emphasis on the ones that have more meaning to you.
If saying the thought in your mind won’t work for you do it on paper. There are many ways you could go about this like making a mind map, writing down lists of thoughts under categories, rewriting the same things over and over again until they stick, etc.
Learn to clear the junk out of your mind and become a better thinker right now. Good Luck!