Mental Workspace

Plot Forge blog · 2026-10-11

Is your mental workspace harmonious with your physical workspace? Is your home and work environment conducive to facilitating the kind of work you must do in your mind?

There's a psychic work table. It's the place where you hold your subject of focus when you are permutating and iterating your ideas. This is not the browser tabs you leave loaded in your head, nor the room in which your beard stroking chair sits.

Imagine this visual metaphor: you're standing by the car with your spouse and are being handed things. A bag, another bag, a suitcase, a roll of paper towels, keys…eventually you run out of hands and start trying to put the paper towels into the bag, and then you start dropping things.

This is how it is with your mental work table. When people think out loud they're handing you things or piling up stuff on your desk, metaphorically, which makes it hard to do work.

Brainstorming and collaborating are great, riffing on conversation points and building a collective thought process with other people. But when one person is trying to do private work, not even necessarily deep work, the additional inputs are derailing. It's already hard to think because there's too much information.

An established mental workspace enhancement is writing. People can multiply their available space onto which they lay out various ideas and their constituent parts to gain a macroscopic vantage point to more easily order their thoughts. The writing effectively gives more RAM that can be loaded with working memory. You still need to be able to focus on that writing, so its expansion is bounded by your mental workspace limits, but that you have the larger canvas helps to guard against the ephemeral vanishing of work without a trace if someone lumps an ill-timed reminder or tries to use your brain as their shopping list.

What can you do to optimize your mental workspace?

Private space to work in solitude, time blocks for ordered living, habits for yourself and collaborators that are congruent with this optimization, good writing tools, and practice. You may not have all the control you need to affect these factors but you can practice. (And respect and gratitude and good diet and exercise and mental health and healthy relationships and mental discipline…)

The best thing to harness is opportunity. When you drive, wait for transportation, or during other down time, use that as free thinking time. You don't need any tools or your hands or eyes. Just recall the topics and lay them out in your workspace, if they aren't already laid out, and process various little thinking jobs that help you arrive at the decisions you'll need to move forward. Even if the environment is too tumultuous to dig in or if you lack essential detailed reference, you can decide about the priorities or prepare to acquire those references so that, when you are able, you fly directly into that work. Even allowing the subconscious mind to settle on the work elements is valuable, especially given the alternative of using media or idling in your default animal automation. There is certainly value in catharsis and emptying cognitive load, but obviously not while you are trying to work.

In my fiction writing, I've found that I can compose and recall quite a few paragraphs. I think they are better than when composed directly in writing and I tell myself the parts I forget will either return in another form or they were not likely to make it past the edit anyway. But even when I can wake up the next morning and scribe chapter one in a single sprint, I haven't usually caught every continuity snag, set-up and payoff, or narrative device echo that I can see plainly with a good structural analysis with a plot grid like Plot Forge or an outline like workflowy.com, or even a system of manic notecard spreading.

The tools enhance the mental workspace. However, you cannot use your manic notecards or a plot grid or outline if you don't have access to adequate mental workspace.

Try it on your own plot. Plot Forge is a plot grid for novelists: plots as columns, scenes as rows, with cause-and-effect links and live checks for paradoxes and unpaid setups.

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