The Mind is a Terrible Storage Device
I love David Allen and his book, “Getting Things Done.” To a type A, organizational and productivity freak, it speaks to me. I’ve also always been a voracious note taker. We are talking volumes of notes. The thought of missing a key idea or concept when I have invested time and or money in an event, peer group, or other learning activity is preposterous to me. You’ll rarely if ever see me without a note taking device.
The reason why became obvious and clear to me when I first read David’s book. In his opinion, people trust their memory more than they should. We assume if something is important, we'll remember it. But that's not how the mind works. It's great for processing ideas but terrible for storing them.
If you think of something important and don’t write it down, it’s as good as gone. The mind has no system for organizing information. It’s more like a whiteboard than a filing cabinet. New information pushes out the old. Even the things you’re sure you’ll remember have a way of fading over time.
The mind wasn’t designed to hold on to things. It evolved to react to immediate problems (survive and thrive!), not to keep track of long-term plans or abstract ideas. That’s why we have tools—pens, notebooks, apps. These aren’t crutches; they’re amplifiers. They free your mind to focus on what it does best: thinking.
Lesson Learned: Don't rely on your memory if you want to do good work. Grab a notebook. Write things down. Treat your mind as a creative engine, not a storage device. Ideas are fragile. If you don’t capture them, they’ll disappear. And you might not even realize what you’ve lost.