Dino’s Journal 📖

One of the results of practicing digital minimalism, is that I have more time to think. The problem is, I’m finding that thinking is hard without being able to write my thoughts down.

Where to write it down, is not as important as being able to write it down.

Processing thoughts and ideas, while trying to keep everything in my brain, is hard. I could spend a good amount of time thinking about something, then my brain will switch gears and think about something else, and I lose most of what I thought about prior to the new idea popping up.

That's because we can only hold on to at most, four to seven items in our head at any time. Which means our brains are not designed to think through or remember multiple things at once. It also means that if we try to keep everything in our head, we will be taxing our brain. It is not an efficient way to think. And so, I have to write my thoughts down.

Writing down my thoughts and ideas helps clear them off my brain. This frees up my brain from having to make multiple context switches between different thoughts and ideas. This allows my brain to focus on thinking through a specific topic or task at hand.

It's been a boon for me really. I've noticed that I'm able to think through things better when I write it down. And so I'll end this post with what I use to write down notes these days.

• For pen and paper, I prefer the Zebra Sarasa Grand Retractable Pen and a hardcover Rhodia Goalbook. I have found these two to be the best combination, when it comes to writing down notes the old-fashioned way.
• For digital note-taking apps, I mainly use Obsidian. It's what I use to archive all my journal entries. It's also what I use to build and publish my digital garden. If for some reason this is not accessible to me, and I don't have my journal with me, I use OneNote.
• On my mobile phone, I previously used OneNote, preferring it over Apple's Notes app. But now that there is an available Obsidian app on iOS, I only use OneNote as a backup.

Tags: #NoteTaking #Notebooks