Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them
– David Allen

I’m not sure where, but I recently came across this quote. I forgot about it for a while, but it resurfaced to the forefront of my mind today.

After doing some digging, searching what I vaguely remembered the quote to be, I discovered that the original is attributed to David Allen, a “productivity consultant”, as noted on Wikipedia.

While my views on productivity, self-improvement, and hustle culture may lean more towards the pessimistic side (a discussion for another day), I’ve actually found this simple sentence from David to be incredibly valuable.

Most of the stress, frustration, and scatteredness don’t necessarily come from having so much to do but from trying to store all of it inside the mind.

Lately, I can’t think of a single thing that I relate with more than this excerpt.

Now, let me go on a tangent for a moment (I promise it’s relevant). While this is almost certainly a me problem, I’ve always ended up trying to over-engineer “the perfect productivity system” whenever I’ve gone down that path. I’ve spent hours configuring dashboards in Notion, trying to create habit tracking systems, project management systems, you name it. The problem is trying to get them to stick.

The annoyingly simple solution that works for me? Carrying a notepad and pen around in my pocket.

The act of scrawling a few words, barely legible to anyone but me, works perfectly for my brain. It allows me to offload my thoughts without sliding down slippery slope of “can this be better?” and veering towards over-engineering another system, ultimately just wasting time.

I can hear you asking, “What about the notes app on your phone?”
Yeah look, I don’t know either. I think the fact that the notebook serves a single purpose – scrawling something down and immediately moving on – offers a better experience than the one given to me by my phone.

Sure, my phone has a notes app, but it also has access to all of human knowledge in there, and sometimes I find that a little distracting.