“Every word written is a victory against death.” — Michel Butor Writing things down is a key to effectiveness. It helps you free up your mind, think on paper, and better organize your thoughts. If you don’t write things down, your mind spends more time “paper shuffling” and creates anxiety. What do you write down? For most of us, writing consists of emails, task lists, and perhaps the odd work project. However, making time to write down certain things, such as our daily experiences, our goals, and our mental clutter can change the way we live our lives.
7 Reasons to Write Things Down Why compose things down? Here are a few critical experiences and updates:
1. Your mind lies. Your mind easily distorts things. That’s a blessing and a curse. If you write things down, you change perspective. Now you are looking at it on paper. Does it still make the same sense as it did in your head?
2. Think on paper. When it’s on paper, you can look your challenges in the eyes, and slice them down to size. Your mind is a powerful thing when it can more objectively look at things instead of swirling them around in your head.
3. Organize your thoughts. To write things down, you have to think a little bit to find the words or to figure out what it means. Right off the bat, the act of trying to write something down shapes your thoughts. Once it’s down on paper, you can now list things in a way that helps you think. Whether it’s because you cross things off, prioritize them, or shuffle them to make you feel good, you are in control.
4. It sinks in better. Writing it down creates a little more of an experience, and that helps it stick.
5. Free up your mind. When you write something down, you free up the task of having to remember it. That might not sound like a big deal when it’s just a few things, but you might spend your mind on better things. And, just imagine when it’s more than a few things, and it’s lots of things on your mind.
6. Calm your mind. The Zeigarnik Effect says we tend to hang on to things in our minds if we don’t finish what we start. If you write things down, you free up your mind from worrying about what you forgot or what you need to remember.
7. Let things go. You can let things naturally slough off by squeezing them out with better things to focus on. You can also more deliberately let things go, or simply cut them, because now you have a bird’s-eye view. Decide what matters and what doesn’t. Let things go that don’t.
On the off chance that you're not previously journaling or composing consistently, you'll need to begin ASAP. That is because the demonstration of writing to get your contemplations off of your mind and onto paper can in a real sense change your life. What's more, when you see the positive changes and changes that occur in your life when you begin to manage things through your composition, you need to do a greater amount of it, on a more regular basis, and for longer timeframes.
