Why you should write down all the ideas that pops into your head

For the longest time, I have had a problem, and this problem is well illustrated with the following story:

Intro

Motivation

For the longest time, I have had a problem, and this problem is well illustrated with the following story:

Picture yourself, a young and innocent Felix, strolling along, on his way to, lets say, meet a friend. While he is going there, he is thinking about all kinds of different things. One thing he is thinking about is his family, which gives him the idea that “hey, when i get home tonight, i should call my mom and tell her how much i love her!” He think to himself that this is a great idea and is looking forward to doing it. After this he moves on to his next thoughts, and eventually I get to my friend’s place and spend all my attention on that. Time then passes, the evening comes, and at that point I have completely forgotten about the idea, and I do not act on it. Bummer.

Now this is quite a specific scenario, but the problem that I want to illustrate here is general: You get a good idea that you can’t act on immediately, and you forget about it.

when i do this, i happen to think about One thing that has often left me feeling unsatisfied is when I forget the good ideas that I have. It can often happen to me that at some point during my day, I get a good idea, like “this weekend, I want to take a walk in änggårdsbergen”, or “I want to call my mom when I have the time” or “I want to watch this documentary at some time that fits me”. This can happen at more or less any time, for example in the middle of a conversation, while I’m driving or when I am on the bus, while I’m having lunch or when I am in a meeting. A lot the ideas that I get is actually pretty good (add cool glasses smiley), but the times when they come up are usually not the best for actually taking the ideas further, because I’m busy with other things, so for me to be able to actually take the ideas further, what also has to happen is that I will have to remember this idea at some later point when I actually do have the time, which unfortunately does not happen all that often…

I have heard a quote that I liked and that I think summarizes my point here pretty well, and that is:

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them”

this is a quote for the author David Allen, whom I will get back to in the end. But the way I interpret this quote, stated in a more clear way is: Good ideas pop up in your head more or less all the time, and that is great, but for them to be valuable to you, you have to remember these ideas for a time that you can act on them, which is a completely different skill, and one that we might not be as good at…

So, if this is true, what should we do about it?

For me, the best solution to this is to get all the ideas that pop into your head, written down.

Whether it is a big and important idea like some deadline that you really have to keep, or just a small thing, like “it would be nice to take a bath when i come home tonight, not at all necessary to do, but would be nice”.

I have been doing this for around a year or two now, and I feel like this is one of my most successful habits, that i don’t really see people around me using, so which is a big reason to why i want to share it here.

Examples of ideas to remember

So first I want to give you some examples of what I mean by “ideas that pops into your head”, now this could be anything that you want to remember, but some good examples for me are the following:

• Something you want to do when you get home from work or during the next weekend

• A grocery that you see that you are almost out of in your refrigerator, so you want to buy more of it

• You sit in a meeting at work and say to everyone that you will do something until the next meeting

• Having a conversation and friend recommends a book or article that you want to read

• You realize that you want to book laundry time when you get home

• You realize you want to call your mom and talk about something as soon as the time fits

• Something you realize that you want to buy

• Something you want to book, like a train ticket or restaurant visit

• A person you want to get back to and send something specific to

• An idea of a gift or a christmas present that you want to give to someone at some point

The general theme for these examples to me here is that all of these ideas and thoughts can pop up at any time, they do for me at least, but the time that they pop up is not a good time for acting on it, but instead, you want to act on them at some future point.

How to get them written down

So how do we get these ideas written down? A potential blocker here is that you dont really know or it is too much effort involved in getting it written down, so an important step here is to find the easiest ways possible for you to get them written down, and to make it clear to you how you do it and when you do what and so on. The way I do this and recommend you doing it is in one of the two following ways:

I write it on my phone or computer. I bring up my phone, unlock it, open a note-taking app, i have chosen “google keep” which i find responsive/not laggy, and i write it in a list dedicated to this that i call my “thoughts list”. I say it to my phone. I general i thinks that these voice assistants can be very useful in making your live smoother, and this is one of the ways for that. I say it to my phone and use the voice assistant to add it to the list, so for example “hey google, add “remember the application deadline” to my thoughts list”.

It doesn’t matter which way you do it or to what list you add it, just make sure that you save it and that you can find it when you want to look at it later. I just want to give you some detail on how you can do it, to make the process clear to you.

With this, I more or less never forget anything, and I feel confident that I remember everything that I want to remember. I use this habit both in my personal life and for work, and I feel like this always helps me a lot, whether it is the former or the latter.

After a few days of racking up, this is what my list could look like this: (show picture that corresponds to earlier examples)

What to do with the list once you got it

So now you have all your ideas written down, and as long as you use this list “correctly”, you will not forget anything that is there. But lets talk about what it means to “use it correctly”

This is however easier said that done. For example if you write everything down, but never look at the list, then it wont help you at all. So what you have to do firstly is to look at the list when you have the time to act on stuff, probably when you are at home, without anything planned.

I usually look at it during the evening or weekend, and see all my good ideas that I have been writing down during the day or week, nothing forgotten! I usually enjoy looking at this list because most of the time I find a lot of good ideas, and I also realize when I’m reading them that it would have been a high probability that I would have forgotten the idea forever, if it wasn’t for me getting it written down.

If the items you have written down are immediately actionable, like “take out the thrash”, or “book laundry”, then you can just do them immediately and check them off, and for those ideas, this is all you need. But other items, you might want to keep track of longer, for example a specific movie you want to watch someday, you will want to save for a longer time, and be able to bring up easily when you sit down on the couch, say two months from now. And keeping all the movies and other stuff there in the list for a long time will make the list veeery long, and it will be hard to find the items you’re looking for. So what you should do is to see this list as an “inbox”, from where you, when you have the time, can sit down and “process/move” items from it to some other place where it fits better.

For this, I use a program that is called “Notion”, you can think of it a bit similar to an excel sheet, where you can create columns with different tags, and then filter the items based on the tags. Here I add relevant tags to each item, some examples:

next action: for actionable things I want to get done like “call mom” or “book laundry”

shopping list: if it is a grocery that I want to buy

someday maybe for ideas that i want to store somewhere but not act on for the moment, like “learn photoshop”

waiting for if there is something I am waiting for to happen that I want to keep track of, for example an email response, getting something from a friend, or a delivery of something I bought online.

to watch: if it is a movie or similar that I want to watch.

I have even more tags and columns, like Due date, or if I have and item which I want to do, but not until a future date, I have a wait until column, where I can add a date, so that this item is not showed to me until that date, for example if I want play volleyball outside, but right now it is too cold, so I want to act on this first when it is warmer outside, then I add “wait until: june 1st”.

So what i do then, once every few days, is that i take my inbox, and process them, which means that i think about what i want to do with them, and most of the times, i tag it with some tag, this is what that could look like with the previous list.

In notion then, i can get different lists based on the tag, so here i have one list with everything that i have tagged with “Next action”

With these tags, it is easy for me to find the info I need when I need it. For example:

When I have time to do stuff but I’m not sure what, my “next action” filtered view is a great inspiration on things I can do that I want to get done. When I am grocery shopping, I just bring up the “shopping list”- view. When I sit down to watch tv, I often ask myself “what should I watch?”, and usually I get ideas on this that I want to watch during my weeks, but it is hard to remember all of them when you are sitting there, but with this I can just go to Notion, click on my ”to watch”-filtered view and see all the thing i tagged as “to watch”.

I recommend you to get a “tagging system” as well, but for a start, i think that could be overwhelming, so recommend you to start by getting this habit of getting stuff written down to your “inbox”, and once you have a full inbox, it will be more natural to start to tag stuff and move them to better places. I can tell you more about this tagging and tracking system at another time, but for now I don’t want to overload you with another thing, so let’s leave it at this for now.

Upsides with all of this

Okay, so that’s “the system” that I want to share. Now let’s recap a bit and conclude the upsides with having a system like this.

Now the main upside with doing it this way is that: I forget nearly nothing, basically nothing “slips through the cracks”, and this is the core of why it is so good, but just to emphasize how good it is, ill give some more, related upsides, which are all mostly just consequences of not forgetting things.

I am more productive and get the things that I want to do, done.

I feel less stressed because I don’t have to juggle everything I want to remember in my head, being afraid and stressed about the fact that I might have forgotten something, but instead feel confident I have it saved in my system.

People have more trust in me since I more often do what I say that I will do.

People appreciate me more for being reliable, both in work and personal life.

I find it fun to be this systematic!

How to get the habit

So if you are convinced that this is a habit that would be good to have, the hard part here might be to actually get this habit of getting your ideas written down, because for this to happen you have to realize every time you get an idea that “hey, i should get this written down or else i might forget about it”. For me this comes quite natural now.

For me, my chain of thoughts, which made me remember to do it was basically, “ok here is a good idea”, “if i dont do it now i might forget about it, and i dont want that to happened, how do i solve this problem?” and then this is the solution What are your thoughts? So, that is how I wanted to explain the idea. Now I want to hear your thoughts on it. Do you think this is useful? Do you do this, or a version of it already? Do you think it is overkill? Do you have any questions on how to do it? Any comments of questions in general?

I hope this was clear, tell me if you are curious on any detail that i did not metion

Final note / reference / further reading recommendation

I got inspired by this idea when I read the book “Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity” by David Allen. It was a very good book with a lot of good ideas on how to remember what you want to do and how to make sure that you get them done. I can recommend the book to you all if you want more ideas similar to what i just talked about, and I use more ideas from the book in my life, but this habit of writing down all ideas that pops into my head is the one that I feel by far is the most important to me.

I hope this was inspiring. Now take whatever you want from this that fits you, whether that is nothing, a certain piece of it, or everything, but most importantly, make sure you do the things that you actually want to do, and not the things that happen to be in front of you!