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Why You Should Always Think on Paper
Boost your productivity by committing to writing things down
If you want to be genuinely productive, you need to focus 100% on what you are doing. With tasks perceived as fun and interesting, that shouldn’t be too hard; since you enjoy doing them, the focus comes for free.
But if you need to deal with something you don’t feel like doing, like a not-so-interesting work task, then the game changes completely. Depending on how strong your self-discipline muscle is, your mind will start to wander, and it will be harder to stay focused.
How can we deal with this? Often, the biggest hurdle is that we haven’t yet decided what to do and how to do it. As you have already heard a million times before, you should break down the problem into smaller, consumable parts. Not exactly ground-breaking news.
However, if your preferred method to resolve this is to lean back and contemplate, you are doing it wrong. Here’s why:
1. Millers Law
Every thought will lead to another, and soon you have flooded your working memory. Have you heard of the 7±2 rule, a.k.a. Miller’s Law? In short, it states that our brains can only juggle a finite number of things at any given moment.
2. Associations
As an effect of this, you will miss out on potentially useful insights. When your mind enters associative-thinking-mode, it will generate a whirlpool of thoughts. Some will stick, but most of them won’t. Which leads to the unpleasant feeling of having had a marvelous idea, which you cannot recall. It’s all too easy to stray away on a seemingly relevant tangent to the matter at hand and dismiss them as irrelevant. But what if one of those elusive thoughts was an excellent idea for another problem?
3. Distractions
It doesn’t take much to break our train of thought. Even if we find what we are focusing on interesting. Ideas are often elusive in nature, and even a minor distraction can wreck your train of thought.
To summarize, while it sure is possible to reason about complex problems without writing anything down, you will get far better results if you practice thinking in writing.
