Tim's Wee Part of the World

Brain Fog probably isn’t a new term, but it’s one I use to describe that condition where you know where you are and where you want to get to, but the “How to”, the bit in the middle, is really unclear. Just like being in a Fog!

At the moment, I’m in the middle of caressing Mike Filsaimes Butterfly Marketing Script into a new membership site, incorporating a Forum and a few other little things I’ll be adding. So I can see the Big Picture, but at the moment when it comes to deciding how to tackle incorporating the Databases ( of course I want the one login to let the members have access to the Forum etc) it’s a bit foggy upstairs in my brain.

The reason I’m building this membership site is to help others overcome those Foggy Brain Moments. It’s going to be my platform for dumping all the stuff I have learned and am still learning into a format anyone can understand. ie – Help dispel the Brain Fog. In fact I’ll be showing how to defeat the brain fog on the site.

So what causes Brain Fog?

It’s a combination of things, but can be best described in two ways.

1. Not having a Clue what’s required and
2. Not having a method in which to describe the steps you need to take

How to overcome Brain Fog

I apologize for this not being an over enlightening description, it’s just some thoughts for you to consider.

What is needed is a way you can start bashing out ideas. It’s kind of like mapping out the steps. Now, even though we have all these wonderful software programs available to us, you still cannot beat the old Pen and Paper to get the ball rolling.  Afterwards, I like to fire up my OpenOffice Writer, create a document, give it a meaningful name and save it in a location where I’m going to find it again. So in the document I note down the things I’ve just written in my notebook and just start blasting, giving no thought to layout, headers, bolding, pretty text fonts… Those are distracting and you can go back afterwards, during the clean up process to sift through the points and put them in some order.

DON’T worry if you repeat yourself. If you catch yourself thinking, I’ve just written that, shake it off. Many times you’ll be saying the same thing but slightly different because of some thought you had, that proceeds it.  You can filter these things afterwards during the Clean up Stage.

Ok a brief example.

Say you want to build a website and you’ve never done one before.

The 1st step would be – Why do I want to build a website in the first place?  That will help you know what the websites content is going to be about.

How do I create a Website? Oh no – Brain Fog alert….. You can search Google and find out, there are lots of great tutorials and guides on how to build a website. So this would be a research phase. Note down the various options… Do you actually want to learn how to do it yourself or do you want to pay someone to do it for you.

How do you want it to look like? What do you want it to do as in navigation or features like a Forum etc? For this stage I find it really useful to just write lots of sentences that start with “I would like it to….” or “If someone does <this>, then they can do <that>” changing <this> and <that> for the actual actions. And again, just blast and not worry about repeating yourself.

So Research and Write and get the facts.

From there you can make some sort of decision or if you are still suffering from Brain Fog, go find someone to talk about it with who builds websites.

Or you can come along to my new website once I’ve got it into a reasonable state.

You can sign up now for free, but there isn’t too  much to see there at the moment as we’re still putting the pieces together. It’s because I’m suffering a bit of brain fog at the moment that I’ve written this post to give me a few minutes to sit back and to also do what I’ve just been talking about. You could say this is a very simple “blast” about how I’m going to get over my Brain Fog moment.

Mind Mapping

Mind Mapping is s a great way to quickly get your thoughts out on “paper”, well your the screen on your PC, and move them about easily into some logical order at the end of it all. At first it’s little daunting, but like with anything, once you get into the swing of it, it becomes quite natural.

There is a Free MindMapping Tool which isn’t as super sophisticated as the higher priced alternatives, but most of the time you’ll never need those features, let alone use them.

The program I’m referring to is called FreeMind and it’s freely available ( and it is free ) and will run on any operating system (which I always appreciate).

Click on the image to see a larger version

I just created the sample for this post in about 15 minutes. Which included playing with the export tools. You can save it in Flash so it’s interactive in that you can close and open the nodes on the webpage. That’s neat! I’ve just saved it as a jpeg file here.

So you can create links to internal programs and documents and launch them, a feature I really love as you can tie things together nice a quickly. Of course you can link to other Mind Maps, so you might have a master map that you link to your sub maps.

There are a lot of graphical symbols you can use and assign to mean what you like. I always like to add a little legend when I am doing that, as you can see on the image. There isn’t a lot that it cannot do.

Sounds like I need to do a little video on how I use it. So try it out, it’s very simple to use and intuitive. You just need to play with it a little bit. The main point is, you create a “Thought” and you can simply drag and drop things on the page. It’s so easy to move things around. So after your initial brainstorming, you can get serious and categorize things. It’s kind of fun to use.

So it’s back to the writing out my ideas for me.

I’m trying to decide on the neatest way to incorporate my members scripts Database with the Forums Database and drawing the relationship diagrams etc. It also helps to be wide awake, but just going through the process of getting what’s in your head out onto something like a piece of paper, a document or drawing, helps you sort things out.

And once you go through this pain the first time, it’s all  been worked out and documented. So next time won’t be so painful. In fact it will be a base to build upon and what once cause you Brain Fog will be like a bright sunny day and you’ll get done what it is , you set out to do!

Oh and I’ve just blasted all of this out, so if it reads like a jumble of ideas and thoughts, that’s how it is. I’ll come back later and do the Clean up. But I do have to get back to my website building. So hopefully you’ve gotten a little bit out of this.

If you have, I’d love to know. If you haven’t , I’d also love to know. Simply leave a comment and I’ll reply back.

Ok I’m off to clear my Brain Fog!

Cheers

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