Take notes, so you don’t have to remember everything.

You can get pocket notebooks for cheap. They are like an extension for your brain.

And I don’t mean to note just work stuff. Note genuine thoughts and ideas.

Digital notes to speed you up

For work-related note taking, use whatever text editor you wish. Obsidian is quite nice. But any editor will do. Use vim if you’re a nerd. Save your notes in more than one place to protect them from being lost.

These notes act as your make-life-easy notes. Populate them with links, commands, scripts, hacks.

Physical notes to point out the direction

Carry your physical notebook and a pen in a pocket at all times. You will note that thoughts come to you throughout the day. Watch for new ideas.

Also, your brain subconciously processes all of your experiences. Everything you load into your brain serves as context. Dreams are postulated to be new compositions of the thoughts in your context.

At some points, contextual thoughts, problems, will have finished processing. Use your pocket notebook to capture the result of the processing. More often than not, the captured thought is very valuable and a solution to a problem you are facing.

The most valuable thoughts are directive ideas. Those ideas point you in the right direction. There is a difference between productively ticking off tasks in your backlog, and knowing which tasks to take on at all.

Working in the right direction is more important than working productively. Force applied in a well-considered direction generates impact.

What do you want? Who do you want to be with? What do you want to spend your resources on? Those are directive thoughts. They come to you when you don’t expect them.

Capture them in your pocket notebook.