I Empty My Brain Before Bed. Do You?

Most nights at home, I sit down with a physical 5 Minute Journal and process the day. That’s the ritual. I’m clearing my mind so I can sleep.

When I travel, I don’t always have the journal with me, so I switch to a digital app like Evernote. Same job.

The medium is less important than emptying the brain so I can transition into rest. I’m not a perfectionist, which is why the habit survives. Some nights it’s messy. I still write.

If “journaling” sounds like a thing you have to be good at, drop that. This is a brain dump. Physical or digital. What’s your shutdown ritual?

Brooks Duncan uses a Hemingway line from The Sun Also Rises to describe how a productivity system dies. Two ways: gradually, and then suddenly.

You miss a weekly review. The to-do list gets stale. Follow-ups get missed. You start feeling overwhelmed. That decay is quiet, so you ignore it. Then you stop trusting the system, and you stop using it. Does this sound familiar?

The weekly review is the oil change for your brain. Ignore the sticker on the windshield long enough and the breakdown is expensive to fix.

Are you in the gradual phase right now?

Brooks has a useful explanation for why the weekly review feels impossible. The first time you do it, it takes 1-2 hours. You’re learning a skill. He compares it to learning to drive. First time, you’re consciously checking mirrors and pedals. Later it becomes a 2-second automatic action.

It gets faster with repetition. If it still takes too long, you’re likely missing a checklist or a system. With a checklist, Brooks can do his in 25-30 minutes. That’s what makes it sustainable.

Time your next weekly review. If it takes more than 45 minutes, you need a checklist.

Here’s the thing. Most people choose apps based on hype or reviews, then hit app burnout when the developer pivots or the app shuts down.

I use a dating analogy for this. You wouldn’t date without knowing which qualities are essential to you. Honesty, ambition, whatever actually matters on your list. You shouldn’t download an app without defining your criteria either. Privacy. Portability. Cost. Maybe you value local data storage over cloud sync. That’s a real value. Put it on paper before you install anything.

The Verge article “My Impossible Search for the Best Journaling App” is sitting on the exact tension. “Best” is subjective. It depends on your values.

Brooks has been looking at the same trade-off. Feature-rich apps like Day One have streaks and prompts. Private, portable tools like Obsidian use plain text and need more setup. Many “personal” apps eventually pivot to serve businesses, and the value proposition changes. Evaluate apps on data ownership and business model sustainability, subscription versus one-time purchase, so you don’t get burned when an app shuts down or changes its pricing. Markdown and plain text are the safety net.

Make a personal app selection framework. List your top 3 non-negotiables for a note-taking app. Then audit your current subscriptions. Are you paying for features you don’t use?

Brooks argues Microsoft Loop will outpace Notion in active users not because it is better, but because of ecosystem lock-in. Same pattern as Teams versus Slack. Teams is a hockey stick because it is pre-installed for millions of corporate users. Slack has to market to onboard people. For teams already in Microsoft 365, notes, tasks, and Copilot inside Outlook and Teams make the switch logical. Good enough, already in the ecosystem.

Audit your stack. Are you paying for a standalone app when M365 or Apple already offers a good-enough integrated alternative?

Multitasking is a hidden habit that makes people miserable. The brain is designed to focus on one thing at a time.

I contrast that with overcommitting. Sunlight without a magnifying glass is spread thin and weak. With a magnifying glass, it’s concentrated enough to start a fire. Most professionals are overcommitted, spread thin, rather than just bad at saying no. The fix is focusing energy on a few high-impact areas.

What are the 1-2 things you’re spreading too thin on? Those are your sunlight areas.

Brooks distinguishes two types of overcommitment, and the fix depends on which one you have.

1. You can’t say no

Fear. Avoidance. Standard productivity advice loves this one, then tells you to say no by default.

2. You like saying yes

Curiosity. Exploration. A bias toward yes is not inherently bad. If you’re a yes-bias person, you need a system to filter opportunities, not a willpower exercise to reject them.

Which type are you living in?

One last story that’s been sitting with me.

People saw the viral AI-generated image of the Pope in a Balenciaga coat and believed it was real. Even after being told it was fake, they didn’t believe it, because the image quality was so high.

That’s the reality gap. AI-generated media is becoming indistinguishable from truth. You need a new level of media literacy and verification in daily life, including professional communication. Deep fakes are part of this. So is anything that arrives looking finished and true.

Can you spot the AI images in recent news? Test it.

Time this week’s weekly review. If it takes more than 45 minutes, write a checklist and use it next week. That’s the oil change. Miss enough of those and you already know how the sentence ends. Gradually. Then suddenly.