Never NEVER Do Not Write Notes to Yourself

Always travel with something to write on and something to write with. You’re a writer, right? Let this become second nature. Something that works for your style of organization.

It can be your official writer’s notebook - a Moleskine or Field Notes if you spent money or got a gift, a leftover black-and-white school notebook, the spiral from your math class you never used, a little 3x5 flip book for your pocket, or a fun notebook with a movie picture on the cover (I have a Star Wars one).

At least carry a pack of Post-It® notes and a pen. The old ways work best. They’re small, you pull it out, jot it down, peel off the top note, fold it in half using the glue, and put it in your pocket. End of the day when you empty your pockets, the notes are there and go to your desk, ready for you to access and fix that chapter that needed fixing.

If you have a reliable e-note app on your phone or iPad, go ahead, use it, if it works for you — so long as you actually go back and look at the thing! If you don’t access it, then it is of little use. I worry about the people who use the audio recorder pens (“note to self…”) and the like. Do they ever go back and listen to their notes and transcribe them?

For a time, I had an Office365 account through my school, and everyone has a Google Drive for a doc. Those are good to take notes on “in the cloud.” A continuous document and your thoughts go at the bottom of the page. You add to it while you are at work or pretending to do classwork, and you look it over when you get home. Just remember to save the doc to your hard drive now and then; more people have lost so much work, so many documents and forms and slides, over the years by not backing up or transferring their stuff. They change companies, get fired, graduate, whatever, and the old account gets closed and… oh, well…

Do this and you don’t have to depend on bar napkins. I mean, think of that — how many times have you seen a show (or real life) where two people come up with some great idea and a bar napkin is the closest thing to write on? And then it gets wet. Just remember the lesson from Spinal Tap, though, and write clearly (and not drunk): they wanted an 11’ Stonehenge thingy, not an 11” Stonehenge thingy…

In other words, ALWAYS write down your thoughts. NEVER say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll remember this. It’s my brain, so why wouldn’t I? I’ll think real hard about it now, real hard, and then for sure I’ll remember it the next time I sit down to write the piece I was thinking about.”

It won’t happen.

It might, if you happen to encounter the same set of circumstances that generated the idea in the first place. It might, if while writing the piece you were working on, that the idea reformulates. But don’t bet on it.

In the words of Henry Jones, Sr., “I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember it!”

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