Ep 116: Consider
The #1 Brain Hack Creative Professionals Can't Operate Without
SUMMARY
There's one simple brain hack that separates creative professionals who thrive from those who constantly feel behind and overwhelmed. Today we're diving into the Future You note-taking methodology—the most powerful productivity shift you can make to eliminate context switching and create seamless creative flow.
Picture this: It's 3 PM on a Tuesday, and you're staring at a task in your project management system that says "finish the Johnson proposal." You click on it, looking for any notes about what that actually means, and find nothing. No context, no details about where you left off, no indication of what "finish" actually means.
Sound familiar? This scenario plays out countless times for creative professionals who haven't discovered what I call the Future You methodology.
Here's a staggering statistic: Most creative professionals lose 23 minutes every time they have to figure out where they left off on a project. That's the same amount of time it takes to fully refocus after an interruption. For creatives, every vague task becomes a productivity killer.
Your brain isn't designed for modern creative work. We evolved for immediate, context-rich activities, but creative work requires jumping between multiple projects and contexts constantly. Without clear documentation, each transition becomes a mental reset.
Core Principle: Treat Future You Like a Stranger
The breakthrough comes when you start treating your future self like a completely different person—someone who needs detailed instructions, context, and clear next steps. Assume they have zero context and no retention between work sessions.
The Three Essential Elements: What, Why, Where
Every task needs three types of information:
1. WHAT - Clear, specific action required
Start with action verbs: review, create, finalize, research
Include specific deliverables or outcomes
Define what "done" looks like
2. WHY - Context for decisions and direction
Why is this task happening?
What decisions led to this point?
How does this fit into the bigger picture?
3. WHERE - Current status and next logical steps
Where are we at right now?
What are the next logical steps?
What files or resources are needed?
The Handoff Test
Your task documentation should pass this simple test:
Can someone else pick this up and make progress?
Are all necessary context clues included?
Are the next steps obvious and actionable?
⚡️ Key Takeaways
⚡️ Each well-documented task saves 10-20 minutes of context recovery time - If you document just 6 tasks per day properly, you'll save a full hour of productive time.
⚡️ Context switching is costing you creative energy - Every moment spent figuring out what you meant in a vague task is a moment stolen from your creative potential.
⚡️ Future You methodology creates compounding productivity gains - The extra 10-20 seconds you spend documenting now pays dividends every time you return to that task.
💬 Notable Quotes
💬 "Every vague task for you or your team is a productivity killer."
💬 "I need you to paint done for me. I need you to close your eyes and paint a picture with your words of what done looks like."
💬 "Future You methodology isn't just a better task management hack—it's about respecting your creative energy and using it for what matters most."
What You Can Do Now
1. Conduct a Task Audit
Review your current project management system. Click through your tasks and see if descriptions are blank or vague. If they are, Future You will thank you for fixing them.
2. Implement the Three-Part Structure
For every new task, include:
What: The action needed
Why: The context and reasoning
Where: Current status and next steps
3. Create Context Templates
Develop standard templates for common creative tasks like revisions, client feedback integration, and team handoffs.
4. Use Meeting Recordings for Context
Record meetings and use AI tools to extract tasks with full context. This ensures nothing gets lost in translation from discussion to implementation.
Resources
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
The Future You methodology transforms how you handle creative work by eliminating the mental archaeology that kills productivity. When you stop wasting mental energy on context recovery, you free yourself to focus on the creative work that only you can do.
Ready to implement systems that actually work? Visit dustinpead.com for more resources and follow @dustinpead for daily insights on creative systems and processes.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals looking to scale their business with systems and processes that actually work. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, and I help creative teams move from chaos to clarity so that they can focus on what they do best—creating amazing work. Whether you're a designer, agency owner, creative director, or leading an in-house team, this show is designed to give you practical frameworks and actionable strategies that you can implement today. We're not here to talk theory. We're here to help you build systems that free your creativity and scale your impact.
I want to start with this story. Picture this: It's three o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday and you're staring at your task in your project management system that says "finish the Johnson proposal"—whatever that's supposed to mean. So you click on it, look in the description for any notes at all as to what that means, and nothing. There's no context whatsoever. No details about where you left off to even begin to finish it. There's no indication of what "finish" actually means. And so you end up spending the next 20 minutes trying to remember what you were thinking when you wrote that task. You start digging through emails and basically doing detective work on your own brain.
Does this sound familiar to you? This is the exact scenario that has played out in my life dozens of times before I discovered what I now call the Future You methodology. It came to me one day when I was thinking about the joke where someone's like, "That's not a today you problem, that's a future you problem." That's why you make poor health decisions or maybe do things that you shouldn't do because you think, "Oh, that's a future me problem." And one day it hit me—yeah, it is a future me problem, but I can set up future me for success.
I realized that I was constantly setting up my future self for failure. And the way I was doing that was by assuming that I was actually gonna remember the context that my present self had crystal clear in mind. When you get to the point where you're like, "I gotta stop, I gotta go, somebody came in and interrupted me, and now I gotta do this other thing"—you had all the context in that moment, but when you go back later to finish it or to continue another part of the project, you forget it.
So the breakthrough came for me when I started treating my future self like a completely different person—someone who needed detailed instructions, context, and clear next steps. And once I made that shift, everything changed. No more context switching, no more mental archaeology, no more detective work, no more starting every work session by trying to figure out what past me was thinking.
Listen to this staggering statistic: Most creative professionals lose 23 minutes every time they have to figure out where they left off on a project. Twenty-three minutes—the same 23 minutes that it takes to fully refocus after an interruption. For creatives, this includes unclear tasks. Every vague task becomes a productivity killer. I'm going to say that again: Every vague task for you or your team is a productivity killer.
Your brain isn't designed for modern creative work. Our brains evolved for immediate, context-rich activities, but modern creative work requires jumping between multiple projects and contexts. We can't have the onboarding call with the client for a video project and then jump right into all the pre-production work and then jump right into the actual production onset stuff and then jump right into post-production editing and then jump right into revisions—there just aren't enough hours in the day for that. So there's constant context switching, even if it's just from one day to the next.
What I'm getting at here is that without some clear documentation, each transition becomes a mental reset. The creative professional's dilemma is documentation—we move fast and we assume that we're gonna remember the details, but there's so much creative energy going on in our brains at all times that we end up wasting that creative energy on administration instead of creation because we're trying to dig through our emails and trying to figure out what this project was supposed to be again. We turn in something that was totally off topic because we didn't set future us up for success.
Teams suffer when handoffs lack context. We don't have the same person doing the onboarding as the project kickoff as the pre-production research as the onset production as the post-production. We typically don't have the same people doing that. And so when we're handing things off from one part of the process to the next, we're losing context everywhere. There are context leaks all throughout.
That's why I've been working on this framework of the Future You methodology. And it connects directly with our DO versus DUE framework because when tasks lack proper context, we can't accurately estimate the time that's needed, and that throws off our entire margin calculation.
Let's get into this Future You principle. You need to think like your future self is essentially a stranger. That stranger needs detailed instructions on where to pick up where you left off. You need to treat future you like a totally different person. Assume they have zero context. Assume they have no retention or memory between work sessions.
Now, this doesn't mean you have to build out a full-level report. I'll show you here in just a few minutes—I showed you on the most recent couple episodes ago as well—a screenshot that I've been using often. You just need a simple two or three sentence description as to what the task is and the simple context. The context could be the bigger picture of the project and where this fits in, or the context could be where it's coming from—where that task is being handed off from—and where it's going handed off to next. Where does this fit in the piece of the puzzle?
You need to include decision-making context, not just outcomes. Provide the same level of detail that you would give a teammate—you're just the teammate, but tomorrow or next week or next month or next quarter or next year. Sometimes we even say, "I want to do this in our business every quarter, every year." I'm so guilty of this. My team will tell you—I'll say, "I want to do this in our business every quarter, every month, every year." And unless we write down the context in that task that we put into our Asana, when that next month, quarter, year comes up and we see a task that says "wellness retreat," we're like, "What is a wellness retreat? What am I supposed to do with that?" But when we're looking at the context and the future us context, we go, "Ah, yes, I remember we said we wanted to do this and this is exactly what it was that we said we're going to do."
There are three types of information that future you is going to need every single time: the what, the why, and the where.
What: Clear, specific action required. This is the description of the task. What is it that I'm actually supposed to be doing right now? I don't know what "finish Johnson proposal" even means. Who's Johnson? What's he got going on? My mind's been in a thousand different places since the last time we talked about the Johnson proposal.
Why: This is really where I love to put the future you context, or what I call "future me context" in the task description. That's the context for the decision that was made and the direction we're going. It's kind of both sides. If you're standing in the middle of the train track, where is the train coming from and where is the train going next?
That leads us to our last part, which is where: the current status and the next logical steps. Where are we at right here on this deal and what are the next logical steps to get us down the road?
What you'll start to see is this compounding effect of this good documentation or what I call the Future You note-taking methodology. I call it a methodology—it's not really a framework, it's just a method. But each well-documented task will ultimately end up saving you 10 to 20 minutes. So if you take the extra 10 to 20 seconds as you're finishing up one task before you move on to the next thing or before you move on to the end of your day, take the extra 10 to 20 seconds, write down a quick description of what's going to happen next, where it's coming from, why it's happening, and boom—you're off. You can take your hands off of it and you can relax because future you is gonna handle it the way they need to.
It's gonna reduce decision fatigue all throughout the day. You can imagine if each documented task saves you 10 to 20 minutes—let's say it only saves you 10 minutes, and let's say you have six tasks in a day to complete. Now, if you're like me, six would be great—I usually have more like 12 to 13—but if you had six tasks a day to complete, and if it was well documented with this Future You methodology, and it saves you 10 minutes each, that saves you a full hour on your day. A full hour.
It's gonna create momentum moving forward instead of friction. It's gonna allow you to delegate better and to collaborate better because you're gonna have freedom of mind. You're going to feel like you have a little bit more of that green zone that Carey Nieuwhof talks about in "At Your Best."
Now we all know the productivity expert David Allen—his book "Getting Things Done" features that whole methodology of next actions. But the Future You methodology takes it just a little bit further by ensuring that those actions actually have full context. It's not about just knowing what the next step is—that's 100% true, you do need to know what the next step is—but you need the context for that next step and the step after that and the step after that as you go down your work-back schedule in your task management system.
We're going to break down a task here just like we always talk about. We're going to start the task with a clear action verb: review, create, finalize, research, finish, continue if it has to be broken up into multiple parts. Then you're going to include specific deliverables or outcomes. What is the handoff at the end here? Is this a PDF? Am I just trying to get it to this status before it moves on to the next person or the next phase of the project that I'm not going to touch right now?
Define what "done" looks like. I use this all the time. Brené Brown talks about this in one of her books where she talks about "paint done for me." I will often say in a meeting, "I need you to paint done for me. I need you to close your eyes and paint a picture with your words of what done looks like here with this project, this task, this vision." When you think of what this looks like done, paint done for me. So define what done looks like for your future self.
And then obviously adding current status and the context notes—those future me notes—all of that comes together to create the perfect Future You methodology.
So you're sitting there, wrapping up a task or a project or a meeting. A lot of this happens in meetings. You want to capture the decisions that were made, yes, the tasks that are gonna have to go along with it, and the reasoning for those tasks. You want to include any relevant file locations or access information. How many times have you spent five to 10 minutes at the start of a project searching for where the file is? In most project management software these days, you can attach the file to it. So one of the things we work on at Chief Creative is that we constantly say, if it's gonna involve me referencing something or I'm gonna need a file to work with, why not just grab the link to that file—because it's probably in Dropbox or Google Drive or something—throw that link right into the task so that when I sit down to do that, everything I need is there. I got the full future me context, I know exactly what's happening, and I have all the files right at my fingertips.
If the task is dependent or there are certain items that you're waiting on, you can notate that as well so that when you get there, you know, "Ah, yes, I needed to follow up with Bill about this before I hand it off to Julie because that's how this thing is gonna go. I remember that now."
So when you got all that down, you need to do what we call the handoff test. The handoff test is simple: Can someone else pick this up and make progress on it? Could you call someone else from another department who has no idea what you do or why you do it, and could they look at that and go, "I think I could figure that out. I think I understand what you're saying here." That's how you know you got it good. And it needs to be concise and simple as possible so your brain doesn't have to read too much and take all that time doing that as well.
The second thing is: are all necessary context clues included within that task? That's the meat—the context is the meat of the Future You methodology. And then lastly: are the next steps obvious? "Obvious" is a big word here. I don't have to think about the next steps. It's super clear. It's obvious. Anyone would know. And are those next steps actionable? Going back to the verbs—is it a review, create, finalize, research, whatever it is—is it actionable or is it just an idea?
Having these things move from one part to the next will ensure success with your task and future self every single time.
Here's a few ways we see this play out all the time. At a project level, Future You methodology includes creative briefs that can include decision context, design iterations with notes and reasoning of why those choices were made, client feedback integration with different action implications, and status updates that tell the story, not just the facts of how you got to where you got to.
Then on team handoff protocols, there's stuff like designer to developer handoffs, account manager to creative team briefings, revision cycles with clear next steps, and client presentation prep with background information.
And then maybe you're just sitting there in your creative process and you're trying to integrate this concept, this Future You methodology. With concept development, you can document reasoning: Why did I choose this concept? Iteration cycles, you can use clear progression logic: How did I get there? Again, as much context as we can give, the better every single time for Future You.
Basecamp, which I'm not a huge fan of, but a lot of people use it—that project management system emphasizes context-rich communication. Context-rich communication aligns with what we're talking about when we talk about the Future You methodology principles: context-rich communication. Always think about context for Future You.
So what can we do now? I want to give you a few things that you can start doing immediately this week to implement this Future You methodology.
Number one: we always talk about a task audit or a project audit, or what Pixar would call a postmortem. We've done this thing, let's look back on it. Audit the tasks that are in our current project management system. Click on them, click around a little bit. See if there's anything in the description at all. If the descriptions are blank, you got a little bit more work to do. I promise you that future you is gonna thank you for it.
Number two: implement the three-part task structure where we talked about the what, which is the action; the why, which is the context; and the where, which is the current status and next steps. So enter what, why, and where. If you click on one of those and it's blank, just go: what is this, why is it, and where is it gonna go? Where is it coming from? Where is it gonna go? Where is it at right now?
Third thing: create context templates. Now, I'm not trying to template out every single thing, but if this is a real struggle for you, then maybe a template will help. So you can develop a standard template for common creative tasks like revisions.
If you're like me, I'm just gonna be straight up honest with you—I think I posted this on my blog earlier this week and kind of walked you through how, so I won't regurgitate too much here, but I will tell you what I do for Future You methodology the most is I record all my meetings—not because I'm trying to catch somebody saying something they shouldn't be saying. I'm recording my meeting for future me and I'm recording my meetings for future us and my team to know the context of everything.
So what I'm doing after those meetings is my team and I are taking the transcripts. We are running those through an AI program that we use called Claude, and we've got Claude programmed to know these are the things that we're looking for. I want you to build out the tasks that are our responsibility, the tasks that are someone else's responsibility with timelines and with this Future You context. And it always gives us the what, the why, and the where every single time. So we just take that stuff, put it right into Asana, forget about it, come back—we have the full context immediately. We pick up where we moved on.
I am still working on the Future You documentation templates, but I do want to tell you that as they come available, they're going to be at dustinpead.com/free. I might even put up a Google doc there temporarily just so that you can see, but you can go download this whole Future You documentation template. You can find that at dustinpead.com/free. As soon as I get it up there, I promise if it's not there when you listen to this, it'll be up there very shortly. And I'm sure I'll send an email out about it as well. So if you want to hop on our email list, go over to dustinpead.com/newsletter and hop on that email list.
Just a couple of shout-outs here: "Getting Things Done" by David Allen, "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Our Future You note-taking methodology—I'm working on building out some templates and things like that to go along with this, but at least you'll have something documented, some kind of notes to be able to have as you start to implement this with yourself and your team.
Listen, the Future You methodology isn't just a better task management hack. It's about respecting your creative energy and using it for what matters most. When you stop wasting mental energy on context recovery, you're going to free yourself up to focus on the creative work that only you can do. And that's why we're here.
So remember, every moment spent figuring out what you meant in a vague task is a moment stolen from your creative potential. And future you deserves much better than that. And your clients deserve the focused and energized creative professional that results from implementing this methodology.
So start today with just one project. Document everything like you're handing it off to a stranger and watch how this simple shift transforms not just your productivity, but the quality of your overall creative output.
I want to remind you: visit dustinpead.com for more resources and follow me at @dustinpead on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, places like that for daily insights on creative systems and processes.
Next week we're addressing the question that I hear most often from creative professionals: "I'm overwhelmed. What do I do?" We're going to break down the anatomy of what overwhelm is and why traditional time management advice constantly fails us creatives. We're gonna give you a step-by-step walkthrough for getting back to clarity when everything feels like it's urgent. We're gonna stretch that out and we're gonna strip that back a little bit.
So if you're drowning in deadlines, if you're struggling to prioritize or feeling like you're always behind no matter how hard you work, that episode's gonna be for you. We're gonna give you the tools that you need to breathe again and take back control of your creative practice.
I want to thank you so much for spending time with me today. Now go create something amazing with systems that actually work. We'll talk to you next time.