It was David Allen who said "Our mind is for having ideas, not holding them." I see alot of people treating their brains like a cabinet where they store everything and anything, but I discovered that the brain works better when you treat it like an excellent idea generator rather than a journal.
If there's one very significant life hack I have come to realize, it would be the ability to write down all my important and some unimportant stuffs on my journal. Yeah, it seems simple and ordinary, but it is a life changer if you start practicing it.
There was a time when I thought my brain was enough to capture and remember every details and events of my everyday life. Maybe it was easier to remember some few things, but overtime, I realized I was overloading my brain with some unnecessary stuffs and this was affecting my productivity and general mental health.
This were the days when I would try to sleep but end up rolling from one end of the bed to the other because a million and one thoughts were moving through my head at the same time. Somrtimes I fall asleep in that state and start getting traumatizing dreams in my sleep.
Everything changed when I learnt this life hack of writing down thoughts, ideas and everything else on a journal. It is more like offloading the weights of the brain and make it light to funtion better. My journal is not the "Dear Diary, today the barista smiled at me" kind, I am talking about externalizing my brain by writing down everything that matters and most things that don't.
My journal isn't pretty, as it doesn't have inspirational quotes on the cover or perfect handwriting inside. It has crossed out passwords, random sketches of app ideas, and enough wallet seed phrases and passwords to many of my online activities.
This is a very safe practice as long as I keep the journal safe. I now write many of my logins, passwords, and seed phrases here, because it feels unhackable and can help me get back to work if anything happens to my devices.
I lost access to alot of my stuffs online when my other device got damaged, because at that time I hadn't started writing my logins offline. This thought me a big lesson to always have an offline backup plan.
This hack has gradually turned into my new habit because whenever a new thought or idea comes to my mind, even if am not near my journal, I quickly start looking for pen and paper to write it down so that I don't forget or store it in my brain.
You know that feeling when your brain is a browser with 47 tabs open, and you can't find the one that's playing music? That's cognitive load, and it's exhausting. What no one tells us is that every thing we try to memorize, every appointment you strain to remember, takes up mental RAM.
When our RAM is full, everything slows down including our ability to think creatively, solve problems, or even to get new ideas. The mental health impact was immediate and I stopped panicking about forgetting something important, thereby improving my general wellbeing by over 50%.
