Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share three techniques you can use to declutter your mind in a world that requires a lot of thinking. So these are three techniques that I've found, especially helpful for me in my life during times where I've needed to think about a lot of stuff, where I needed to get things done, hold ideas, not forget things. And I think in those moments, which I know we can all resonate with, there's a fear of, if I'm not thinking, am I going to be able to be as productive as I normally am? So hopefully this will help. The first tip is by a gentleman named David Allen.

He says the mind is for having ideas, not holding ideas. And instead of holding those ideas, his suggestion is to delegate that to something else. If you have an assistant, awesome. More power to you. And you could have them think about it.

But the cheapest way to do this is just to use a piece of paper or the notepad in your phone. Anytime you have something you need to do or a schedule you need to maintain, instead of, of holding that in your own mind, make sure it's outside of you in a place that you can reference. That will be really helpful for not feeling like I need to be keeping all of these things in my mind in order to get there than done. You know, it's there. You've written it out beforehand and you can address it when you need to and be present with whatever it is you're doing when you're doing it.

This leads to the next thing, which is planning out your day, the night before. Now I know sometimes this feels like, Oh, I'm creating too much structure in my day. It's going to become more rigid. I want to be more spontaneous. But in my experience, if we don't know what we're doing or the important things that we need to do and when we're going to do it, we ended up spending all of our downtime thinking about when I'm going to do those things.

Or we're on a call and we're thinking about when I'm going to fit in the next call. We're doing an email. We're thinking about all the other emails we have to do. And so by scheduling out your day, even if it's just a rough outline the night before. It frees up your attention to know, okay, at 9:00 AM, I'm going to do this.

At 11:00 AM, I'll do this important thing. And at 3:00 PM, I'll do this important thing. It doesn't always go according to plan, but having a rough outline gives you the peace of mind to know that you've already thought it through and you can be fully present when that time comes. And the third thing is scheduling unscheduled time. Allocate blocks of time throughout your day where you just don't do anything.

One, this will allow you to feel some ease knowing that those time blocks are going to be there. But two, those are time blocks where you can let your mind go off, get caught up in things that you want to think about, imagine, create, instead of feeling pressured to have to do that during your other periods throughout the day. So hopefully these three tips give you a little more freedom in your meditation practice so you don't have to be thinking about so much, and freedom to not have to be constantly thinking about what needs to get done during your day. Try it out. Thank you for your practice.

And I'll talk to you in the meditation until then take care.