I practice a modified form of Zen meditation. Typically thoughts that come up while sitting should be let to pass by, somewhere off away from your conscious attention.

This is complete anathema to the Getting Things Done methodology.

When I’m meditating, a lot of times things that have been bugging me, things I need to do or take care of, that have been hiding beneath my conscious level of thought come up. So, I do what any good GTDer would do. I write them down. I keep a notebook in front of me and write them down immediately, and then go back to meditating. This way I really get them out of my head, rather than trying to somehow forget or ignore them, and they’re recorded so that I can properly deal with them later.

Once my dictaphone arrives I may try leaving it recording while I meditate, and reviewing it afterward. That way I could simply speak rather than having to move my arms from the proper posture.

I noticed tonight, and have noticed on other occasions, that things build up when I don’t meditate daily. I may think that everything is out of my head, but when I sit down to actually meditate, all kinds of stuff comes forward. Today it had only been 4 days since my last meditation. I filled an entire page of college-ruled paper (one item per line) with items I needed to somehow address. When I went a week without meditating, I filled one and a half pages at the same density.

Part of me wants to keep track of how many items come up while meditating and relate it to my inter-meditation interval or minutes of meditation per week. I’m pretty busy right now, but I’ll probably do it at some point. From my sample where n = 2, it seems to be a nonlinear relationship. 1.5 pages for 7 days, 1 page for 4. I guess it could be linear, but the y-intercept is not zero. (I think it’s 1/3?) If I always have 1/3 of an idea in my head immediately after meditating, that could be valid.