Read Your Notes

I have talked a lot about writing notes to help you remember things. This is a great tool, but there is one crucial point to remember: if you don't read your notes, they won't help you.

I know this sounds incredibly obvious, but I think that it is worth mentioning. I write notes all the time and I frequently don't read them.

When I was in high school, I used to write notes on my hand. I managed to go entire days not looking at the message on my hand, only seeing it when I noticed the ink rubbing off as I took a shower before bed.

I decided to move from writing on my hand to using a folded up sheet of paper that I would keep in my pocket. Every time I reached into my pocket, I was reminded that the paper and my notes were in there. The problem was that I would never unfold the paper unless I was writing down a new note. I knew that I had notes there, so my brain never told me to read them.

In college, I made to do lists, some on paper and some on a Word document. Both failed pretty significantly. At one point, I got an iPod Touch and used the notes function to replace the folded up paper, but still I frequently forget what I have in there.

Even now, my list of ideas for future blog posts has a general idea, then an extended description of it, but I often only read the main idea and ignore the rest. When I write a first draft or story overview, I will keep notes at the bottom or top of the document (or in the margins if on paper) for key points or reminding me what happens next if I am taking a break for the night. Very often I still ignore these points.

It can be very frustrating. For one thing, I can spend hours wracking my mind to try to think of what I was wanting to do, not realizing that I left a note to remind me of exactly what I wanted to do next. For another thing, I may come up with an idea that sounds really cool, but halfway through writing it, I find my original note which is very different and then I have to decide which version of the story to pursue (potentially scrapping a lot of promising work). And of course, sometimes I come up with a truly brilliant, amazing idea, and then I go through my notes and find out I already came up with that idea weeks earlier.

So I repeat, read your notes. Writing them isn't good enough. It can help, but it only goes so far. Don't feel confident in knowing that they're written down already, read them. Read them regularly. If you cannot say in specific words what your notes say, then you don't know or remember them. That means you should go read your notes again.