Follow The Urge to Write Things Down
I love writing things down. I don’t mean hyperorganizing my notes or coming up with elaborate note-taking frameworks. I mean simply having a thought and going through the exercise of expressing it through words (and/or pictures).
There is a reason why I use the term “exercise” here. Converting thoughts into notes is a skill, which implies that you might not be great at the start, but you can become better with practice.
Once I started occasionally writing down my ideas, I started feeling an urge to do so every time one came up. This is textbook habit formation, but even so I did not expect it. This urge is a good way to shorten the gap between intention and action in writing things down.
Why is it useful to write down your thoughts?
The simplest reason is that the act of expressing a thought forces you to refine and concretize an idea. You might have an intuitive understanding of an idea, but communicating that idea in a way that appeals to the higher-level thinking of others requires you to understand the relationships underlying it.
Often while attempting to write down an idea you will realize that you don’t actually understand it. Or you end up reevaluating some of the assumption that you might not have even realized your intuitive brain was making.
This is the main reason why writing things down can be invaluable.
Another reason is that thoughts are often fleeting and it’s useful to be able to be able to look back on your thoughts. I find it quite interesting to see what state of mind I was in some number of weeks, months or years ago.
How do you write things down?
In order to facilitate capturing thoughts as a habit, it’s useful to be able to quickly and easily take notes — low barriers — usually through technology (or for me a nice desk setup with sticky notes).
Sometimes there are just random thoughts that I think are cool. I don’t go through those very often. I have a bit folder of such notes (on Bear Notes) and I end up browsing through them a couple of times every year.
If it’s a bigger idea or closely related to something I am doing now, I write it down somewhere I can see it easily, so I can go through it and have it in the forefront of my mind more often. This usually means writing down on a sticky note on my desk or bookshelf, or putting in on the landing page of my Notion workspace.
The first step is just writing something down. The next step is, if you’ve got the time, expanding on that single idea. Sometimes this can mean writing down a whole sentence rather than just a few words. Other times it means writing a couple of paragraphs of thoughts I am having related to that idea at the time.
Quick tip: make sure to time stamp your notes, it’s nice to know how long ago they were crated and can give you some context about when you were in this state of mind and what time frames your thoughts and attitudes changed in.
Use this practice
Whenever I get the urge to write something down, I do it. If I can, I expand on it, but even the simple act of writing it down can provide an immense amount of clarity.
You might not have the urge to do so right away, but you will notice that it shows up as you observing the benefits of writing things down.
As always, the best thing you can do is take the ideas that I have laid out here and put them into your own life. Figure out what works for you. Make the practice your own.
I hope sharing my experience has been useful for you in thinking about your own practices. I would love to hear your thoughts on any of this, so feel free to leave a response or get in touch.
Thank you for investing your attention with me!
This article is part 7 of my 50 Bad Articles initiative, where I write 50 crappy articles in 50 days, in an attempt to kickstart my writing journey.
