Stop making more work for myself: easy to say, yeah, but difficult to do, right?  In fact, it's actually not as hard as it sounds.  As David Allen points out in his book Getting Things Done, we spend a ridiculous amount of time having "the same thought twice," by which he means thinking through what we need to do next or how to handle something for a second, third, fourth time, because we haven't actually done anything with that thought yet.  And until we do something with it, the situation is just hanging out there, causing us stress either explicitly or through our subconscious.  Every time you brush your teeth, you think, "better buy some toothpaste, we're nearly out."  Then you find yourself two weeks later cutting open the tube so that you can scrape the last vague hints of toothpaste from the inside, wondering why you let this happen every time.  It's because you're letting yourself have the same thought ("better replace the toothpaste") over and over until it is meaningless.  That's the wasted brain energy that David Allen wants us to target.  

So how do we fix it?  Snap the cycle: if you can do something with the thought, do it immediately.  No procrastination, no excuses, just do it, especially if it will only take a few minutes to do.  And if it can't be done, (which is a big chunk of the time; you probably can't run out to the store right this second to buy that toothpaste), record the thought somewhere that you trust and that you know you will return to (yeah, that Post-It note that will fall behind your desk 5 minutes after you write it is probably not the answer).  Better yet, set a reminder in your phone or on your computer for a specific date and time so you know you won't miss it.  Sure, you can still ignore that, but you're at least one step closer to making your life easier.