How to Clear Your Mind & Organize Your Life

Bryan Anze's course is built around a simple premise: five days, five short exercises, each meant to clear away a different kind of mental clutter. The structure is consistent throughout. Each session opens with a short framing story, gives a single instruction, tells the viewer to pause the video and write for five to ten minutes, then returns to add a second layer, almost always a version of the 80/20 rule.

What the exercises actually are

Session one is a brain dump: write down everything on your mind, mark what's within your control with a star and what isn't with a circle, then let go of the circled items and carry the starred ones forward in priority order. Session two extends the same mechanic to unfinished business, borrowing the idea of "open loops" from the human potential movement to describe unresolved conflicts, unanswered messages, or half-finished projects, then asks the viewer to either resolve or consciously release the heaviest ones. Session three, "getting out of the gray zone," draws on the concept of full engagement to identify moments when attention is split between two domains, like being at work while thinking about family, and asks for a list of those split-attention zones followed by a plan to protect focused blocks of time. Session four repeats the same list-and-prioritize format for a different target: physical, emotional, and mental energy drains. Session five closes with the productivity pyramid, a four-tier model (zero-value, low dollar-per-hour, high dollar-per-hour, high lifetime-value activities) meant to redirect attention toward the tasks that compound over time.

Where it holds up and where it doesn't

The pyramid is the one idea with enough specificity to be genuinely useful. Distinguishing busywork that "comes looking for you" from high-leverage work you have to "seek out" is a clarifying frame, and asking for three to five concrete activities at each tier forces real self-assessment rather than vague intention-setting.

The rest of the course is thinner than its five-session structure suggests. Four of the five exercises are the same move: list, mark, prioritize, let go, repeated with a new label each day. The 80/20 rule gets invoked in nearly every session, sometimes with the same tomato-garden anecdote about Vilfredo Pareto, which starts to feel like padding rather than reinforcement. None of the exercises are demonstrated on screen; the viewer is simply told to pause and write, with no example list, no sample output, no worked-through case to check their own results against.

The delivery also undercuts the material. The narration is loosely organized, repeats phrases within the same sentence, and leans on the same handful of metaphors (glasses, energy thieves, a detuned Ferrari engine) without much variation. At 35 minutes total across nine lessons, the actual instructional content is closer to a single detailed worksheet than a multi-day curriculum, and the promised "5 days together" framing oversells what is functionally a short set of journaling prompts.

For someone who has never tried structured reflection before, the exercises are accessible enough to produce a real, if modest, sense of clarity by the end. For anyone who has read about the Eisenhower matrix, GTD's concept of open loops, or Pareto-based prioritization elsewhere, the course will feel like a repackaging of familiar ideas with little added rigor or evidence behind the claims.

What you will learn

• ·A brain-dump exercise for offloading worries, sorted into what you control versus what you don't
• ·A method for identifying unresolved 'open loops' (unfinished conflicts, tasks, commitments) and closing or releasing them
• ·A self-check for spotting when you're mentally split between two areas of life instead of fully present in either
• ·A quick audit of physical, emotional, and mental energy drains, then a plan to cut the worst offenders
• ·The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) applied repeatedly to prioritize which items on each list matter most
• ·A four-tier 'productivity pyramid' for sorting daily activities by dollar value and lifetime value