Have you ever woken up and been filled with immediate dread because the day ahead of you is so busy? It happens to me all the time and is, frankly, a miserable way to greet the morning. It simply does not set you up to have a positive experience or be productive. There’s a way to quickly right the ship, however, and turn all those tasks into motivation. It’s called a “brain dump” and you should try doing one in the a.m. to have a more productive day. 

What is a brain dump?

A brain dump is similar to a brainstorm, except you’re actually (figuratively) dumping the contents of your brain. In this case, you’re dumping them into a notebook, planner, or digital document. The trusty old Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a brain dump as “the act or an instance of comprehensively and uncritically expressing and recording one’s thoughts and ideas.” When you’re doing it for productivity, that “uncritically” part is important. Just write down every single thing you need to do for the day. Don’t categorize or prioritize anything; you’ll get to that. 

So, a brain dump could include anything from “finish the big project at work” to “take the dog to the groomer’s” to “buy the ingredients for my kid’s birthday cake.” Don’t be afraid to put down anything that you have coming up in the next few days, either, if those things are weighing on your mind today. I just did one and ended up with tasks from all areas of my life that need to be done this week, but ideally today or tomorrow: Finish my list of big story pitches (work), make my additions to a joint spreadsheet (work), send my birthday party invites (personal), check on the class I’m waitlisted for (school), get my eyelashes done (personal), get my laundry ready for the cleaners (personal), send my computer to the shop (work, personal, and school). There are way more than that, but you get the idea. 

Your goal when you brain dump should be to see the volume of tasks and feel the weight of remembering them all lift from your brain. Even if you were to stop here, with this jumbled mess of responsibilities and to-dos, you’d have them all written down and could stop thinking about them over and over. But you’re not done here. 

Prioritize your brain dump

Now that you have every single task written down somewhere, it’s time to prioritize them. My favorite prioritization method is the Eisenhower Matrix, which forces you to identify which tasks are urgent and important; not urgent but important; not important but urgent; and not urgent and not important. You do this by drawing a matrix where the X axis represents urgency (timeliness) and the Y axis represents importance, then writing each task within one of the quadrants created. 

You can also try Kanban, which asks you to sort your work into the categories of “to-do,” “doing,” and “done.” If you’re going with Kanban, use a pencil you can erase or create a large board and put the tasks on sticky notes, so you can move them through the stages of completion. Kanban is less helpful for prioritization than Eisenhower, but it does help you visualize where you stand with all those tasks, which is helpful in the same way the brain dump is: You need to see everything laid out so you’re not wasting your day trying to remember what needs to be done and what phase it’s in. 

---

Recommended products and additional reading

Try using these tools to enhance the brain-dump process. 

• A dot grid journal will give you the space to brain dump without making you feel like you have to keep it all neat.

• A six-color assortment of highlighters will give you some extra oomph if you use them to categorize your dump tasks (i.e. “home,” “work,” “school,” “personal,” “family,” etc.) so you can see the volume of responsibilities within each sphere.

• A color-coded whiteboard will help you prioritize with the Eisenhower Matrix or Kanban, so you can stay on-task after the dump.

A Lifehacker reader recommended The Artist's Way, a classic guide to becoming more creative that has been selling for 30 years, because daily brain dumps—called "Morning Pages"—are part of the process outlined in the book. It also includes affirmations and other daily tasks designed to help you become less wound-up and more creative, so if your daily tasks are all stress and you don't feel like you're reaching any kind of higher plane with them, this could be a good place to start.

---

Why the brain dump works

The brain dump helps you start your day by getting all of your worries, responsibilities, and tasks out of your head and onto paper, so you can see the volume of what needs to be done without spending your valuable time trying to remember what it even is. It’s recommended all over social media and the blogosphere by people who rely on it to declutter their minds. Instead of trying to remember everything you have to do—or stressing about it—you transfer it to your dump. Honestly, after having given it a shot, I can say that it really does alleviate some stress right away. And with that stress minimized, you’re free to get moving on the actual tasks, which will give you a productivity boost. 

One note: Try it out the traditional way for a while and see how you feel. If it's not working right, consider changing your timeline. A few different Lifehacker readers said they prefer to do brain dumps at night to quiet worrying and stressing about the next day. This is especially helpful if you find you struggle to wind down or sleep at night because you're thinking about everything the next morning holds. Jot down everything you know you need to do, get it all on paper and out of your mind, then prioritize it in the morning and get to work.

As the seasons change, I am on a mission to convince you that fall is not just for yard cleanup, but a bonus planting season for crops and garden build out. Case in point: why do we typically plant a bunch of herbs in spring and ignore them in fall, even though fall is an ideal time to put some of them in the ground? No, particularly tender herbs like basil and, er, Thai basil aren’t going to thrive, but quite a few herbs are cold hardy and hot to go during these later months.

Here are six herbs that you should plant in fall to enjoy in all of your hardy cool weather cooking. 

Cilantro

Cilantro haters to the left, please. If you love cilantro (and I do), you know that it is prone to bolting in summer, which means it’s around for a good time, but not a long time. That’s why fall is the right time to throw some seeds down in your beds to grow some cilantro out before a freeze sets in. Look for cold hardy varieties like Caribe.  

Dill

If I had to choose only one herb for the rest of my life, it’d be dill. Once you have it growing nearby, you will put that stuff on everything. While varieties like Dukat are cold tolerant, rather than cold hardy, if you get lucky, you can get enough dill in your beds to self sow, peffectively erennializing the bed so your dill comes back yearly. Seriously, do it. It’s one of the best things in my garden. 

Chives

I know we’re all used to dried chives, but the real deal is so much better. Chives are long, mildly spicy, and can be chopped for garnish, but you can also use them to tie bundles of carrots together. Don’t overlook chive blossoms, which pack a punch; use them to flavor vinegar and oil. 

Parsley

I feel like parsley has been relegated to Pluto status—it reeks of generic, tasteless spice, but I happen to love it, even the curly variety. The crispy fresh crunch it adds to dishes is everything to me, and being able to harvest an entire bunch for a batch of tabbouleh is magic. Parsley is cold tolerant, and will self seed. 

Sage

Once you plant sage, you never need to plant it again—sage moves in for life. While you won’t get new green leaves during winter, you can still harvest what’s left, and it’ll be back en masse in spring. To make sure you can enjoy it in the fall, grab a sage start instead of seeds—your local nursery will still have them. 

Thyme

If you are going to roast anything this winter, it’s going to be better with thyme. This low lying ground cover can hide in your garden and survive almost any weather nature throws at it. Caveat: Make sure you’re grabbing winter thyme and not summer thyme. 

You don’t have to plant your herbs together, I have them spread out across the yard. You do have to keep them someplace you can access in winter, so the edge of beds, someplace that snow won’t block access to.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Scientists who helped pioneer artificial intelligence are warning that countries must create a global system of oversight to check the potentially grave risks posed by the fast-developing technology. The release of ChatGPT and a string of similar services that can create text and images on command have shown how A.I. is advancing in powerful ways. The race to commercialize the technology has quickly brought it from the fringes of science to smartphones, cars and classrooms, and governments from Washington to Beijing have been forced to figure out how to regulate and harness it. In a statement on Monday, a group of influential A.I. scientists raised concerns that the technology they helped build could cause serious harm. They warned that A.I. technology could, within a matter of years, overtake the capabilities of its makers and that "loss of human control or malicious use of these A.I. systems could lead to catastrophic outcomes for all of humanity." If A.I. systems anywhere in the world were to develop these abilities today, there is no plan for how to rein them in, said Gillian Hadfield, a legal scholar and professor of computer science and government at Johns Hopkins University. "If we had some sort of catastrophe six months from now, if we do detect there are models that are starting to autonomously self-improve, who are you going to call?" Dr. Hadfield said. On Sept. 5-8, Dr. Hadfield joined scientists from around the world in Venice to talk about such a plan. It was the third meeting of the International Dialogues on A.I. Safety, organized by the Safe AI Forum, a project of a nonprofit research group in the United States called Far.AI. Governments need to know what is going on at the research labs and companies working on A.I. systems in their countries, the group said in its statement. And they need a way to communicate about potential risks that does not require companies or researchers to share proprietary information with competitors. The group proposed that countries set up A.I. safety authorities to register the A.I. systems within their borders. Those authorities would then work together to agree on a set of red lines and warning signs, such as if an A.I. system could copy itself or intentionally deceive its creators. This would all be coordinated by an international body. Among the signatories was Yoshua Bengio, whose work is so often cited that he is called one of the godfathers of the field. There was Andrew Yao, whose course at Tsinghua University in Beijing has minted the founders of many of China's top tech companies. Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering scientist who spent a decade at Google, participated remotely. All three are winners of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing. The group also included scientists from several of China's leading A.I. research institutions, some of which are state-funded and advise the government. A few former government officials joined, including Fu Ying, who had been a Chinese foreign ministry official and diplomat, and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. Earlier this year, the group met in Beijing, where they briefed senior Chinese government officials on their discussion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

René Rebe, a 25-year Free and Open Source Software developer, was swatted live in the middle of a development stream.

Every year, I fill my garden boxes with fall crops, full of hope. Unfortunately, my boxes are full of slugs, and by January, I’m lucky if 50 percent of my plants have made it. The same thing happens in spring—aphids, squash bugs, cucumber beetles, and cabbage moths crawl out of the soil and begin their assault on my future crops. There are topical treatments and tricks, but the real answer is to go back in time to fall and take care of the problem before it starts.

Remove plant debris

At the end of the summer season, it is tempting to let things compost in place. But those plants are perfect hiding spots for bugs to slumber and lay eggs for spring. Compost them the proper way, in a compost pile that reaches temperature, so the bugs and any other viruses and fungi are mostly eliminated. Rotting fruit on the ground can attract vertebrate pests (in other words, cats, dogs, wild animals, and rodents).

Remove plastics and non-compostables

If you’re like me, you’ve got row cover and trellises and tarps around from your gardening efforts all summer—it’s important to put these materials to bed correctly, too. They can also provide a cover for unwanted pests like cucumber beetle and squash bugs. Clean them, and then put them away rather than allow them to stay out in the yard.  

Till your soil

Bugs—such as squash vine borers, cabbage moths, and cabbage loopers—can overwinter if they’re tucked in well enough. One solution is to bring out the rototiller and move your soil around. This should bring the pupae and chrysalis to the surface, exposing them to colder temperatures, which they’re less likely to survive. 

Mow the edges of your lawn and property

Pests need cover, like grass, plants, and other hardscape hiding spots. If you remove those spots at the edge of the property, you give pests a more hostile environment, and they’re less likely to want to hop on over. This is particularly true for harlequin bugs and a number of brassica-loving pests.  

Rotate crop families, not just crops

If you’re putting in a winter crop, remember you still need to rotate beds so that you give crop-specific disease and pests less opportunity to settle in. But it’s not as simple as rotating the broccoli where the cauliflower was last year. You want to think in terms of entire crop families. Move the cabbage to where you had spinach last year, and the cauliflower and broccoli to where you had your winter beets and carrots. 

If you’re going to leave the leaves, chop them finely

Many people advocate leaving your leaves alone in fall, thus allowing good insects a place to chill until spring. If you do so, however, you provide cover to pests as well. Sometimes you have to sacrifice some good to prevent some bad, and you’ll need to weight the value in your own garden of making that choice. At any rate, if you chop any debris finely, it will compost sooner, giving less cover to bugs.

Treat with topical solutions

It's easy to say just skip the hard work and use a topical treatment like Sluggo or diatomaceous earth. As with all the other solutions, these have a cost and benefit. DE has limited effectiveness and must be reapplied frequently, and can hurt beneficial insects as well. Sluggo has to be reapplied often, and can create concentrations of iron phosphate in your soil, which can be absorbed by your vegetables. Now, I couldn't get by without Sluggo, and I try to limit its use, but I'm always sure to give my beds a good dose in fall.

Rokus Headphone Mode lets you enjoy TV audio privately through your headphones using the Roku app on iPhone and Android. Whether you prefer wired or Bluetooth headphones, its a great way to watch your favorite shows without disturbing anyone.