Making a List the Night Before
Nov 20th, 2008 by Carlos
by Jayel Aheram
I’ve written before about how important lists are to becoming more efficient, finding good deals, and getting things done (and saving lives, believe it or not). I really believe that writing things down not only helps you remember, it also helps to spur action. But the other day I discovered yet another way that lists can help me with my writing.
I usually have about 5–10 ideas in my head at one time. Some of them are for this site and others are for my fiction, and all of them go into my trusty notebook. So when I wake up in the morning to write, I flip through it and see what I want to pick from. But lately I’ve had a surge of ideas and I noticed my notebook had around 15 ideas that hadn’t been “done,” and I also had a whole bunch of little pieces of paper with ideas jotten on them. So I decided to sit down and copy them all onto a new sheet of paper inside my notebook.
This was the night before I was going to—in my mind—get them all done. It was impossible, but instead of having random thoughts on random pages, I wanted to have a very specific list (very reminiscent of Getting Things Done, which I almost read)
Instead of being randomly written in as “ideas,” I labeled this sheet “To do list.” This way I wouldn’t waste time flipping through pages and wondering what I wanted to write about. Here was the list—it was a very specific, very direct map of what I wanted to do the next day.
As you would expect, this made me incredible productive the next morning. I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it. But there was also an unexpected benefit: my mind had mulled over all of the ideas I had written down. Simply writing down a prompt like “EMT vs. Inefficient Markets” (coming soon to a post near you), got my mind thinking deeply about that topic. When I woke up the next day I had new thoughts on it. I had new thoughts on almost every bullet I had added to the list. My unconscious mind, knowing what I was going to do the next day, had helped me out and thought things through a bit more for me. It’s not quite “working in your sleep,” but it’s pretty darn close.
The lesson here? If you’re going to do something even remotely creative like fleshing out things on a list, take a little time the night before to actually write them down as specifically as possible so that your mind has some time to mull things over. It’s almost like preparing for an exam or a presentation, and the more preparation you do the smoother it will go.
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