The overlooked aspect of taking notes
You should take notes because it’s impossible to memorize everything.
As William James once said:
“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking”.
To remember the important, you need to free your mind of the unimportant.
That’s why the existence of the search engine is so wonderful. It allows you to browse for any fact, data, and statistic without overloading the brain.
The thing is browsing takes time. And not every time you can find the information you need at the time of writing.
What if you have a drawer of notes at your command? Inside this drawer are smaller boxes containing paper clips separated by topics. These paper clips are not just any clips. They are notes you have accumulated over time on a wide range of topics.
There are facts, stories, examples, news stories. But unlike the general pool of knowledge from the search engine, they are internalized with your thoughts and viewpoints.
You will find that writing is much easier and faster. Less about browsing and more about thinking. You can save hours poring over a quote, a statistic, or study to back up your point. Because the research is already done beforehand. By the time you write, your job is simply arranging these in a structured way.
This drawer of personalized notes also help to avoid writer's block.
Some writers seem to have the magic touch. They can quickly draw inspiration from daily life and turn them into blog posts, emails, or stories.
But most of us aren't so lucky. We tend to reach the end of our creativity thread. We also often feel too tired to create anything at all. Because life is an energy-sucking hole. The environment, people, jobs chip away their energy every minute of the day.
Thus, we need a buffer. A drawer of notes at our disposal so every time we write we don’t have to look for ideas again. We can write even when they feel tired, grumpy, sad, lifeless, or uninspirational.
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