I’m a big fan of trying new things, and often advocate super-rational strategies — stuff that seems to transcend reason — for breaking through. I’ve notice that the smaller the behavior, the easier it is to try it. Sometimes we have to get discrete to overcome the inertia to take a new action. The Micro-Nap has to become the Nano-Nap. I get it.

In the spirit of synthesizing a technique down to its smallest possible constituent ingredient, its MVE (minimum viable essence), I’d like to submit a reduction to the recommendation to my common recommendation to carry a notebook.

In her legendary memoir on writing and life, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott shares an almost irreducible tip:

“I used to think that if something was important enough, I'd remember it until I got home, or I could simply write it down in my notebook like some normal functioning member of society.

But then I wouldn't.

I’d get home, remembering that I had thought of or overheard the perfect image or lines to get my characters from the party in the old house on the hill to their first day on the new job, or to their childhood playhouse, or whatever it was they seemed to think they were supposed to be next. And I'd stand there trying to see it, the way you try to remember a dream, where you squint and it's right there on the tip of your psychic tongue but you can't get it back. The image is gone. That is one of the worst feelings I can think of, to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, and then to lose it. So now I use index cards…

Whenever I'm leaving the house without my purse – in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards – I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it. Sometimes if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers – as if it has just come back to me – and I take out my index card and scribble it down.”

There you have it folks: it’s hard to get simpler than a single index card in the back pocket.

Related: Capture Instead of Compartmentalizing
Related: Keep Your Antennae Up
Related: Make Sense of Things

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