How to Tame your Monkey Brain
I went from trying to constantly think of what to write about to consistently publishing 2 articles every week.
Publishing regularly is more than just being a good writer, it's about creating an efficient system to retrieve ideas and thoughts. And that hasn’t been an easy journey for me, so buckle up!
For years I was a big advocate of the writing camp. I would fill up notebook after notebook. I loved how sensory the experience is - you touch the people, feel the pressure of the pen in your hand. It’s something that is still my go-to if I need to think through something. The 20+ dusty notebooks I’ve filled just in the past year is testament to how writing in notebooks is not very retrievable.
On realising this, I first made the move to Whatsapp - amid a lot of internal resistance (and cringe). Using my personal chat to document thoughts and ideas. Retrievability was better because I could search but things often got lost.
To help with that I started moving all my thoughts from Whatsapp to Notion at the end of each week. I would sit and literally copy paste messages I’d sent to my personal chat over the week to a Notion page. Each thought became a simple bullet point first, which I soon moved to a table. The table make it easy for me to go through things but after a couple of weeks the table became so long that it became cumbersome to scroll through the whole list.
I started bucketing each thought on the basis on the area it was on - ‘Work’ ‘Fitness’ ‘Learning’ among others. This made it easier for me to look at all thoughts I had around ‘Learning’ or ‘Work. I knew I was onto something!
Over time I added multiple tags:
Area - Topic the thought or idea is based on
Source - Where I picked it up from if its referenced or what I was doing when I got the idea
Potential - Where do I want to use this idea - blog, the Learning Nerd’s Diary, social media etc
Published - Added once I published it to help me track it better
My writing time for each article has reduced drastically since I created this system. It is something that will continue to evolve but its something that works for now. Check it out -
While I was thinking of writing this article, I came across an interesting analogy by Anne Laure for your personal documentation system - it’s like ‘gardening for your mind’ !