The power of the pen

I’ve noticed something interesting in the past week or two. Every since I’ve started dumping my random ideas into a notebook, I seem to have more ideas popping up every day. It’s like I just needed to get rid of the stuff at the top so the stuff at the bottom could bubble up into my consciousness.

Yes, this is a basic principle of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” program but I don’t follow that. I’m so unorganized that I doubt I could follow his system for an entire day. However, I can vouch whole heartedly on the benefits of getting things out of your mind and onto paper. It doesn’t matter if you plan on acting on them or if they’re just crazy ideas, the brain likes to hold on to things unless it knows they won’t be lost. What better way to empty out your brain’s current focus than by putting it on paper where you can find it again.

Once you’ve got your ideas on paper, your brain is free to think about other aspects of that same idea, expound on it, or just move on to the next thing. That’s sort of what I do with this blog; this morning I had this idea of this very post and if I hadn’t come straight to work and typed it out, I would have been dwelling on it for hours. Now my brain is free to focus on work which is a bit more important at this moment.

Give it a try, most of us have a notebook and pen at our disposal all the time and if not, you can probably spend $2 and have all the necessary equipment needed to start your mind on the path of freedom to work with its ideas.