As the owner of a software development company, Maria was the one everyone went to with all their problems. 
Her employees would pop into her office with urgent issues that needed solving.
Clients would call with last-minute changes.
Vendors would email about their problems.

Each time, Maria would drop everything to handle the problem as it came.

She'd start her day with a clear plan, but by 10 am she was already jumping from crisis to crisis, trying to remember what she promised to whom.

The worst part?
She'd lie awake at 2 am, wondering if she forgot to follow up on something important or if that client issue from Tuesday ever got resolved.

Maria told me she felt like she was constantly playing catch-up and could never shake the feeling that something was slipping through the cracks.

The problem was, Maria's brain was trying to hold everything at once, and it was breaking under the pressure.

Once we figured out what was really happening and gave her brain the right tools, everything changed.
Maria went from feeling all over the place and constantly worried to being calm and confident that nothing important would be forgotten.


While you are doing any task, you without even realizing it, are using your 28 thinking skills.
When the thinking skills you need to use are strong, doing the task happens easily.
If the thinking skill you need to use is weak, doing the task is a challenge.
The struggle that Maria had came from a weak thinking skill of categorization.


Categorizations

So what exactly is categorization, and why was this Maria's missing piece?

When information comes at you, your brain has two choices:
It can either catch each piece of information like individual tennis balls being thrown at you one by one
Or
It can set up organized buckets to catch similar items together.

Maria's brain was trying to catch every single tennis ball.
Client issue - catch.
Employee problem - catch.
Vendor email - catch.
Meeting request - catch.

By noon, her brain was juggling 47 different tennis balls, and she was exhausted.

But categorization works differently.
Instead of catching individual items, you create systems, buckets, where similar things go together.

Categorization isn't just about being more organized.
It's about giving your brain a system so it doesn't have to improvise under stress.

Because when you're improvising under stress, you make mistakes.
You forget things.
You feel scattered.

But when your brain knows exactly where each piece of information belongs everything becomes calm and automatic.


Maria's Master List

Now, let me share the exact system we used with Maria, plus three ways you can start building categorizations today.

First, here's what Maria did:

She created a "Master List."
Super simple.
Whenever someone came to her with a problem, instead of trying to remember it or solve it immediately, she wrote it on the list.

But here's the magic, within that list, she made buckets. Categories.

Such as a "Client" section.
An "Employee" section.
A "Vendor" section.
And a "Tech" section.

When a vendor emailed about a delayed shipment, it went straight into the "Vendor" bucket without fretting about what would be.
When Maria saw an employee go out of their way for a client and wanted to gift her something for the weekend, she wrote it down in “employee” bucket and knew she’ll get to it at the right time.

This way, her brain wasn't holding onto 50 pieces of information.
Everything had a home.

Then on Fridays, she'd go through her master list and make sure everything was taken care of.
Nothing fell through the cracks, and she could sleep at night knowing her system had everything covered.


Now, let me give you
Three ways to start building the skill of categorization today:

1) Resorting
Take a stack of random items from your desk right now.
Sort them by color.
Then re-sort the same items by size.
And then? Re-sort them again by function.

This might seem silly, but you're literally training your brain to see multiple ways to organize the same information.
Don't just sort once, sort and re-sort.
That's how you build a flexible categorization skill that kicks in automatically under stress.

2) Bucketed Meeting 
Before your next meeting, take your notepad and create buckets at the top:
- To-Do
- To Delegate
- Important Reminders
- Interesting Facts

As information comes in during the meeting, don't just write everything down randomly.
Put each piece of information into the right bucket immediately.

Instead of leaving the meeting with three pages of scattered notes you'll never look at again,
you'll have organized, actionable information.

3) Categorised Shopping List
When you make your shopping list, organize it by store section:
Produce, Frozen, Dairy, Cleaning Supplies etc.

This seems basic, but it's training the same skill Maria needed for her business problems.
You're teaching your brain to automatically group similar items together instead of handling everything as individual, separate tasks.

When you do this consistently, your brain starts doing it automatically.
You won't have to think about categorizing.
It becomes your default way of processing information.




Cheers to Peak Brain Performance!
​