Brand Brain Dump: Declutter Your Mind

Picture a big box of junk. You know the one. It’s been sitting in your closet for months, maybe even years.

It’s your catch-all container for items you don’t know what to do with, but can’t let go of. You have a gut sense these items are useful, but you can’t quite visualize how you’ll use them. The day arrives when you’re finally ready to deal with this stuff. Maybe you’re moving, redecorating, or spring-cleaning. It’s time to make something real out of all these seemingly random objects. What do you do?

You might be tempted to approach it top-down in an organized way, pulling one item out at a time and deciding what to do with it. My advice? Take the opposite approach.

DUMP IT OUT. ALL OVER THE FLOOR.

A little unhinged, I know. But, only chaos can level with chaos. I prefer a bottom-up approach because it lets us accept the situation for what it is. Organization comes later. First, you must embrace the chaos. That’s what creativity is, after all.

Metal Clutter = Cognitive Overload

We know for a fact that clutter creates mental stress. It’s been proven by science many times over, but it’s a pretty intuitive conclusion. If you’ve ever worked at a messy desk or cooked in a messy kitchen, you already know this.

This experience is called cognitive overload. When a physical space is full of too much visual stimuli, our brains struggle to focus and it’s difficult to take meaningful action. It spikes cortisol, a stress hormone, which compromises our decision-making and productivity.

This is also true of mental clutter. Ever tried to sleep with a lot on your mind? It’s like being told to relax in the midst of deep stress: it’s just not gonna happen.

In the wee early stages of building your brand, your mind is just like your box of junk (no shade, it’s a metaphor, y’all). There’s a lot going on in there. It’s full of thoughts, ideas, experiences, and possibility. But, like your box, it lacks cohesive, tangible structure and meaning. Each element has potential, but there’s no clear path from randomness to purpose. Lots of good starts, not a lot of complete ideas. Gobs of inspiration, not much direction. It makes for a start-and-stop cycle and you’re left endlessly spinning your wheels. Any attempts to bring it together ends in word salad. So, what do you do?

DUMP IT OUT.

What is brain dumping and how can it help you?

Brain dumping is exactly what it sounds like. You open up a word document or a notebook and start writing down everything that’s swirling around in your head. No need to organize or plan. Just write. Get it all out. I have a word document literally just for this purpose. When you’re gathering your thoughts early in the branding process, I recommend doing this often, once a day, if possible.

This accomplishes two things:

1. It clears your head.

When you have a lot on your mind (ideas, emotions, goals, to-dos), it’s hard to focus. Think of it like clearing the cache in your browser to improve performance. Making space in your brain before you start officially writing removes distracting thoughts so you can maintain focus and flow. When you’ve dumped everything, it’s easier to organize your thoughts and prioritize. A clear mind leads to efficiency, purposeful decisions, and better insights.


2. It consolidates all your thoughts and ideas in one place.

This has several benefits on its own. Your start to generate a log of all your ideas and moments of insight that you can refer back to at any time. A thought that felt insignificant when you wrote it might be useful to you later on (I’m consistently surprised at how often this happens). With everything in one place, you won’t wrack your brain trying to remember something you thought of two weeks ago. On top of that, as your brain dump zone grows, unexpected things start to happen. You’ll notice patterns of recurring phrases and ideas, and will start to see connections between them that wouldn’t be visible if they weren’t written down.

How does it work?

We’ve established that mental clutter has a similar effect on the mind as visual clutter. A brain dump seems low-effort on the surface. In many ways, it is, which is what I love about it. But there are some layers to it that do involve some effort. Each layer brings you closer to a clear picture, and the effort is mostly in sticking with it and staying open to what arises.

Let’s break the brain dump down and see how it unfolds in each layer.

LAYER 1: MAKE THE CLUTTER VISIBLE

Like your junk box, your ideas and thoughts are so cluttered that it’s impossible to see how they all fit together. This clutter isn’t just messy, it’s occupying space that could be used purposefully. That space in your closet where you’re storing the box is valuable storage real estate. The space in your brain that’s juggling all that brand information could be put to work, but it needs to be cleared out first.

It may seem counter productive to dump your box onto the floor. It’ll be a mess, no question about it. Isn’t that why you put it in the box in the first place? The box started out as storage, but after a point, you can’t even really see what’s inside. In order to organize something, you have to be able to see it.

All of the thoughts you’ve had about your brand are invisibly competing for your attention. If you can’t focus on any one idea, how can you really assess what to do with it? The key is to turn it into something you can see. Making the mental clutter around your brand visible has a magical effect. When you see it, you make it more real. You create the capacity for the mind to focus on its components, and to zoom out when it’s time to put it all together.

Yes, it’s messy. But here, it begins to have a shape.

LAYER 2: IDENTIFY BROAD CATEGORIES

So, you’ve upended your box in the middle of the room. It starts out as an unruly pile of stuff. You can’t make heads or tails of it. But after staring at it for a couple minutes, you notice, “Oh, there’s some cool tchotchkes in here that would look cute in the living room!” So, you make a “living room tchotchkes” pile. Then you notice some loose jewelry, and put that in a pile. Then you notice a bunch of items that were left by various friends, so you set those aside to return later. Suddenly, you’ve got distinct categories with a purpose and potential action behind each one. The light bulb flicks on. Ding!

This is the beginning of a strategy. A loose one, yes, but a strategy nonetheless. The first step to organizing in this way is to identify broad relationships. This is the core reason why I love the bottom-up approach. Start with what you have. Create broad categories around what’s already there, instead of crating categories and hoping what you have fits into them. This will feel way more natural, and much easier, than forcing organization from the jump.

LAYER 3: CULL THE DUDS

Let’s be honest, not everything in your junk box is worth keeping. Can’t picture that five year old commemorative cup living in your space? That hand cream from an old gift set starting to coagulate? Let ‘em go, baby. They’re dead weight. It may have felt at the time like these object had value, but things change, and that’s okay.

Not all your ideas and insights are going to be relevant. When you come across something that you just can’t find a place for, the best thing to do is let it go. Holding onto ideas that don’t add value is a distraction and adds dead weight. It’s better to have a few really valuable ideas than a lot of low-value ones. In the words of Mama Badu, “Pack light.” I firmly believe that if it’s a really good idea, it’ll come back around, so there’s no loss in letting it go.

This doubles as life advice. You’re welcome.

LAYER 4: FIND CONNECTIONS

So, you’ve made some piles and ditched the dead weight. Now what?

Our brains like order, generally. I don’t mean we’re all organized people (I’m certainly not). What I mean is, we naturally seek out relationships between objects and ideas, and that creates a sense of order. We are naturally predisposed to see patterns and connections, which help us make sense of information.


Let’s take your tchotchke pile. It’s time to see what happens with them in context, so you start placing them around the living room. The candy dish goes on the coffee table, the book of jokes goes on the bookshelf, the cat figurine goes on an end table. Oh, you just remembered, you’ve been needing somewhere you put your rings when you wash the dishes. Maybe the candy dish would be more useful by the kitchen sink. Light bulb again. Ding!


When we organize our ideas loosely, further categorization comes naturally because we begin to see patterns. Patterns merge into other patterns, one connection leads to another. When we follow these points of connection repeatedly, a clear picture of purpose starts to emerge.

It can be as simple as a word you see repeated in your notes. You wrote “spacious” twelve times, all within different threads of thought. It didn’t seem significant before, but now that you see the pattern, it’s clear that “spaciousness” is important somehow. By making your ideas visible and categorizing them broadly, you can contextualize them and see how they relate to one another. Now, you can explore what “spacious” means to you, why it’s relevant, and how that idea connects to your vision.

As I always say, good branding requires clarity. Brain dumping is the first step towards clarity.