I write things down. I’m notorious (maybe) for keeping a journal in my purse, authoring an in-advance to-do list, tracking assignments in a college-ruled notebook, and writing in the margins of my books. Pen and paper are my go-to tools.
Not that I don’t use online tools—I do. They help coordinate efforts with clients. Platforms like Trello, Basecamp, Evernote, and Slack keep me in communication and aware of the bigger picture. My folders and bookmarks save needed information for articles and social media posts. The tools, however, are not how I primarily recall information.
Writing things down causes the remembrance. I know, relatively easily, what page I jotted a note on. The writing makes the task or thought “sticky.” It adheres to my brain a bit better than it would if I were to use a notes app or some other digital mechanism.
To write things down creates a sort of “mind castle.” I can find my way through almost any puzzle if I wrote the idea in a notebook or marked a passage in a book. The words float to the surface, even if it takes a few minutes to perform the associative leaps, and I find the words, the image, needed to convey a thought.
My findings are intuitive, but research backs them. A study from Psychological Science finds the people who write things down perform a sort of critical analysis as they write. They can’t capture everything on paper, so they select the most important details, which trigger the smaller, related ones.
The study also suggests that writing by hand eliminates distractions. It makes sense; I can’t really dally around Twitter and Instagram if I’m trying to take notes. My brain can’t do both. It must concentrate on a single task: making sense of information presented and writing down the critical elements.
I experience the sensation every time I write but most often when hand lettering. In that process I become singularly attuned to the words being written. They engrave themselves not only on the paper but also my mind and heart. The words become my words because I choose to write them by hand instead of typing them out.
[…] than prioritize items on a schedule, he is asking his audience to shift a paradigm. It’s easy to write down everything that needs to be done and prioritize those activities once written down. It’s much harder to […]