The Importance of Jotting Things Down

By default, thoughts have no structure. A trained mind can have structured thinking but how to train the mind in the first place can be very tricky. One of the methods that seem to work for me is to write things down. When you write down stuff you are forcing your thoughts to have a structure. When all those random things that you have to do with different deadlines occupy your head, it restricts the brain from clearly thinking. All the people good at multi-tasking are not really good at doing multiple things at one time. They are actually good at dividing big complex tasks into simple ones and then handle them one by one.

A big complex task means a whole lot of decisions to be made to simplify those tasks. And this can seem very complex due to the multiple thoughts that come to our minds while we are trying to do this in our head. It always helps to write things down. We can use a simple technique. Not to worry about the whole thing at once. But rather decide the direction of thinking and then divide it one by one. The direction can be based on the dependencies within the sub-tasks or can be based on any other resource based constraints. Then going through each of them one by one, we need to write everything down.

When there were no computers this used to be a trickier thing to do and required iterations. But doing these iterations would then train the minds and make them better thinkers. Today with technology it’s easier to edit and update and keep improving the structure. But at the same time people have become less patient to do these things. Those who do think of these as new tools that enables them for success.

Letting Go

While it can be a great tool for remembering stuff, it’s an even better tool to let go of something. Our mind has a tendency to hold on to some things. There are some things that worry us and some uncertainties that occupy our minds. These can last for days and can affect our positivity in big ways. At times like these, it helps to write things down. It frees our mind. When the worries are complex, it enables our mind to see that it is not that bad. And even if it is, we have written it down and figured it out. If one is worried, it even helps to think of the absolute worst case scenario and write it down in as much detail as possible. At the end of this exercise, one often realizes that even the worst case possible is something we can handle. It thus weakens the fear within us and helps us re-focus on the positive possibilities.