Last year a friend of mine gifted me an agenda.
It's small with black covers, and it looks really good.
I thought, for a long time, about what I could use it for. I didn't want to waste it on something trivial, but I also didn't want to put something on it and then later change my mind.
A few months ago I decided to use that agenda to write down my ideas, or important things that I may want to remember.
For example, I wrote a few things about several projects I want to work on in the future using Blender. I also wrote a few ideas for a few articles I may want to write at some point. But besides that, I recently started writing things I read about in books or articles, things that I feel like I may need in the future.
As an example, not long ago I finished reading a book called "The Richest Man In Babylon", and in that book I found several ideas about how to keep and make money, ideas that I thought were extremely useful.
So, I wrote them in the agenda in case I want to reread those things in the future, without reading the book again.
Now that I started reading something else, I once again added several paragraphs to the agenda about the things I find most interesting in the new book.
One thing I noticed is that often, we treat ideas and interesting topics we find in books the same way we treat the random ideas we get at random times.
We feel like there's no need to write anything down, because we'll remember what's worth remembering.
I'm sure all of you had a great idea at some point in your life, while you were laying in bed, almost asleep, and you didn't write it down because it required too much effort. You thought it would be impossible to forget such a good idea. In the morning however, you couldn't remember anything about the brilliant idea you had before you fell asleep.
We do the same thing with all the valuable information we find in books or even articles. We don't write it down. If it's important, we think we will remember it. But it doesn't work like that. Our brain doesn't always bother to remember important things. Sometimes, we need to reread the same information multiple times before understanding and remembering it.
Writing all those important pieces of information in my agenda helped me do just that. I now have a better understanding of what the book I mentioned above talked about, and what the ideas in it meant.
I also have a way to rapidly access all that information whenever I need to, without having to read an entire book.
That agenda helped me realized something I failed to understand in the past, and that's that information is information, regardless of whether it's in our mind, or in a book we read. We easily forget things, no matter how important they may seem, and while we have several external ways to store all that information, we often don't use any of them.
Now that I finally realized that, and started storing the information I find most valuable, it's easy for me to access it whenever I want and to reflect on it as much as I need, without needing to remember everything at all times.
