You enter the Supermarket. “Bread, butter, toothpaste, onions. Bread, butter, toothpaste, onions. ” A nearby customer glances at you quizzically as you mumble your list under your breath. Twenty minutes later, you leave the store with a cart full of food – but no toothpaste!
Familiar?
You’re not a storage device
One of Lifes’ truisms is that we forget things – whether it’s groceries, someone’s birthday or, horror of horrors, an important meeting – because our brains weren’t designed to store everything perfectly.
To remedy this, maybe we should outsource our memory. And that means writing things down. But it’s more than the trusty shopping list. That is, all your thoughts and ideas, work-related and home-related, should be committed to the page as they occur.
In a meeting? Get the whiteboard out, scribble on it and take a pic of it before you leave. Profound realization over breakfast? Note down that you need to spend more time with your family.
There’s no ground breaking innovation in jotting things down, but doing so consistently will unload the worries and to-dos from your stressed brain onto a safe place where they won’t be forgotten.
Just be sure to always have a small notepad or your phone at the ready. The latter, which we always have with us, don’t we, has a Notepad App. Specifically for these occurrences. Try it!
But don’t forget to look at it !!!!!!