Best Results Organizing

To improve something, you must first observe & document it. Pen on paper once a day is a sufficient start.— Garrick van Buren (@garrickvanburen) November 17, 2014

Life and the internet have been conspiring recently, causing me to think about the issue of organizing one’s thoughts, and particularly, organizing them with pen on paper, as van Buren describes, rather than by typing.

Over the course of a few weeks, in addition to a speaking engagement and regular client work, I was involved with helping organize Chattanooga’s Second Annual Diabetes Expo. For all of these projects, there were little tasks, insights and just plain blobs of information coming up on my horizon. I encountered information I had to share with others (immediately as well as on delay), and had to juggle oodles of swiftly changing logistics, with not a lot of time to capture, let alone massage and manipulate, the data.

Before and during the expo, I was on my feet, running the length and width of a room the size of a high school gymnasium, plus up and down two short flights of stairs. (My Fitbit loved me that day!) Trying to walk and talk and type on an iPad just didn’t work, and I quickly gave up and went back to my beloved purple legal pad and pen.

A page for problems needing solutions. A page for the mapped layout of all of the vendors. A page for checking off received door prizes. A page for changes we want to make to improve the process next year. You get the picture.

Was my handwriting abysmal and probably illegible to anyone but myself? Absolutely. But when my arms were full, I didn’t fear the budget-busting consequences of dropping my legal pad as I would have with my iPad.

After the month’s early hubbub, as I plowed through all I’d missed reading from my email and RSS feed and Twitter favorites, I eventually noticed the synchronicity of multiple open tabs in my browser. To borrow from Meghan Trainor:

First, I came across professional organizer Carrie Peeples guest-posting on Monica Ricci‘s blog, Your Life. Organized. Carrie wrote about The Secret To Shutting Up Your Busy Brain, and mentioned that:

The act of writing tells your brain that you’ve already processed that information and don’t have to worry about it. It frees your brain to do other things like focus on traffic or solve the next problem. The more you spend time trying to remember something the more time you’re NOT getting other things done.

This is known as the Zeigarnik Effect. Unless we rehearse or repeat things like phone numbers, or the beloved “a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter,” little details disappear from our short-term memories.

And a bigger deal, over the longer term, is that we tend to worry about the things where we’ve failed to achieve closure.

So, Carrie hits on the essentials: get it out of your head and down on paper (or the digital equivalent of paper), and your mind can go from the basic “what” and move on to more robust “why ” and “where” and “how” of the issue. When you write on a sticky note, it makes the information stick. Except, longtime readers know that I don’t want you to write on a sticky note or any other floozies (AKA: loose scraps of paper). I want you to have a notebook (paper or digital) that suits your capturing style. But do CAPTURE the information or ideas before they seep out of your brain and into the ether.

Next, Patrick Rhone of The Cramped, an entire blog dedicated to the analog writing experience, discussed a question of great importance: Why Analog? He delved into just a few of the reasons why handwriting something (vs. using your opposable thumbs to text it, or telling Siri to remember it) is advantageous. Rhone talks about the depth of history of the written language vs. digital data, the siren song of our personal notations, and the way a written draft shows the step-by-step thought process (including messy strikethroughs) that tend not to be visible with what we type. But my favorite of his points is this:

Writing by hand helps me retain more information. Countless studies show that the act of writing by hand is better for both retention and comprehension of ideas than typing them digitally. It engages the senses and synapses by a factor more than digital. I write by hand because it is the best way for me to remember and learn.

The Cramped also pointed me in the direction of Sienna Craig’s Huffington Post blog from earlier this year, entitled Reasons to Love Writing by Hand. Craig, a Dartmouth College professor, expresses surprise when her students report handwriting as creating an obstacle between the self and the expression of self. She writes:

One particularly eloquent student described handwriting as a kind of out-of-body experience: “It just doesn’t feel like it is me writing if I am not on a computer,” she said. This floored me, because for as long as I can remember, writing by hand has felt like an essential way for me to not only grapple with the world, but also to try, as the ancient Greeks remind us, to know thyself. My love for writing by hand takes many forms, and like most love affairs, is bittersweet, twisted in places, not immune to paradox and contradiction…

The entire essay is definitely worth a read (once you’ve finished this post, of course), but it’s her comment about paradox and contradiction that especially struck me, though I wasn’t immediately sure why until DocumentSnap‘s Brooks Duncan retweeted his The Paperless Conference from earlier this year. In it, Brooks — Paper Doll friend and resident expert on going paperless — included various references to my own blog post, NAPO2014: Taking Notes–The Paperless Experiment. That post includes citations of the research Rhone mentioned, above, about the superiority of writing (vs. typing) for comprehension and retention.

But it also gave me some stylistic insight.

Like Sienna Craig, I’m quick to note that I’m not a Luddite. (I hope my techie posts on digital signatures, Evernote and digital photography attest to that.) But I finally realized where the contradiction lies for me: between creating and capturing.

When I’m attending a class and taking notes, or working with clients, when I am doing a consultation on the phone or trying to understand a doctor’s instructions, my instinct is always to capture information on paper. However, when I draft my Paper Doll blog posts, when I write a set of complicated instructions or a delicate email, my fingers itch to reach out for the keyboard.

And certainly when I wrote 57 Secrets for Organizing Your Small Business, the words and phrases made their debuts in Microsoft Word, Evernote and drafts of emails. (My publisher would want me to note that Secret #4 in the book is Be Faithful To Your Information-Capturing System, and explains how to ensure the preservation of important thoughts and information, no matter your preferred capturing style. Y’know, like if you wanted to buy a holiday present for someone with this issue. Just sayin’.)

In essence, I’ve learned that for me, I hand write to take information in, to help my brain process it. But when I create, handwriting is an impediment — it slows me down. Perhaps it’s because I honed my typing skills in December of my freshman year of college, with a friend’s Mac and three term papers to type in one weekend, and now mfffflpffffl years later, my typing speed can keep up with my thoughts while my spidery, aging penmanship cannot.

Before these last few weeks, I hadn’t thought about when and why I choose to use analog vs. digital, paper vs. screen. I only knew that I do, and that it was instinctual. Dear readers, what about you? Are you like Patrick Rhone, all about the pen? Do you emulate pretty-much-paperless Brooks Duncan? Or are you more like Sienna Craig and myself, somewhat self-aware of your contradictory capturing relationship?

Wherever your incoming and outgoing thoughts live, it’s all about the place where you capture them so that you can set your mind free.