Tools for Thought

Keeping thoughts exclusively in the mind allows them to fester and die. As soon as a potentially significant thought enters your mind, write it down. Build in the habit of collection: the act of spontaneously recording anything that has your attention. The faster new ideas are written down, the faster newer ideas will emerge in their place. Collection frees up working memory to allow new information to come in.

It also enhances focus by diverting distractions. When you’re working on something, and a new thought that’s not related to your work emerges, at some level your mind has to struggle between focusing on your either your main work or the new thought. Writing the new thought down allows you to let it go.

I keep a notepad next to my laptop at all times. Whenever a thought enters my head that’s unrelated to the work I’m doing on the computer, I write it down on the notepad, which acts as a mental sidebar. I could keep an open document on the laptop and switch to it when I need to write something down, but I find that switching away from my primary document breaks my focus in a way that keeping a notepad to the side does not.

If you’re already using a ruled notepad to take notes or draft something, and an unrelated thought occurs to you, you can create a “sidebar” one-third of the way in from the right edge with a downstroke spanning 10 lines, or whatever number is suitable, making a second margin. Some stationery providers make meeting note worksheets with explicit sidebars for secondary notes.

Many people know to write things down, but they try to evaluate their significance before deciding if they’re really worth writing down. That puts the cart before the horse, since people are often not in a context where they can devote the attention necessary to assess the their significance. For our purposes, if it has even potential significance, it’s worth writing down. A silly idea might not be so silly after all once it’s been thought through. An idea that can’t be acted on now might be actionable later, when circumstances change. An idea might need a few more minutes of research than you have to spare at the moment.

Collection tools need to be ubiquitous to be effective. It should be as easy to capture a new idea walking down the street as it is sitting at a desk. If you don’t already have a ubiquitous capture tool on hand, experiment with different solutions according to your preferences:

• A pocket-sized spiral notebook
• A voice recorder
• A Moleskine
• A folded sheet of paper
• A cell phone, leaving a voice mail or a text message to yourself
• Index cards
• A Notetaker wallet
• A PDA or smartphone

All of these have their advantages and disadvantages. It’s almost always faster to capture with pen and paper than with electronic devices, but they require double entry if the notes are ultimately going into an electronic tool like Google Calendar. PDAs and smartphones have the benefit of synchronizing with certain Personal Information Managers (PIMs — e.g. Outlook, iCal, Palm Desktop), automating the data transfer, but capturing the information initially is often less fluid than writing it by hand. Evaluate factors like ease of use, ease of information transfer, weight, bulk, aesthetics and cost.