After you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll notice some things have shifted.
You stop having the same conversation with yourself repeatedly. Once you’ve worked through something and written down the conclusion, you can reference it instead of re-arguing it.
You catch yourself starting to spiral and think “I should write this down.” The notebook becomes the obvious tool for dealing with overwhelm instead of just another thing you’re supposed to do.
You start trusting your past self. When you write “figured out X, see page Y for reasoning,” you actually go look at page Y instead of assuming you need to re-figure it out.
You have answers to “what have you been working on?” Because you can look it up instead of trying to reconstruct it from vague memory.
These aren’t dramatic transformations. But they add up to something significant: you waste less mental energy on things the notebook can handle for you.
That’s the whole point.
You’ve got everything you need. A notebook, a method that works, and practices you can use when they’re helpful. The rest is just using it.
Write things down. Think more clearly. Do less work overall.
It’s that simple.
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This is the final post in a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for people who feel overwhelmed to start simply writing more on paper. Get the book →
