Write Every Day for Motivation and Creativity

There are apps for everything–for booking meetings, for having a virtual chat with your officemate who’s only a few seats away, even for identifying what song is playing in the background.

Phones and laptops, then, are indispensable in the office. If you had to take notes, though, using an old-fashioned pen, your hand would likely stutter.

In the abundance of keyboards and touch screens, pen and paper seem archaic, the remnants of another time. Slower, too, and messier–why resort to deciphering your chicken-feet scribbles when you can have it neatly encoded, preserved, and ready for copy-paste?

But writing by hand isn’t dead

And for good reason–it’s way better for creativity than typing. Writing by hand stimulates various areas of the brain, and studies prove that students remember the contents of a lecture better when they write it down by hand rather than typing it out on a laptop.

For all our modernity, physical journals remain in demand–putting away your devices and writing your thoughts down on the page is incredibly therapeutic. It also allows for more self-expression: typewritten letters look the same, but a filled-up notebook can contain doodles, scribbles, all sorts of personal  touches.

Even though you might consider Evernote, Google Calendar, and Notepad as your lifeline, bringing a notebook to work and taking the time to write there can supercharge your creativity and momentum.

Turn it into a commonplace book

If you save articles for later reading, collect quotes on your phone, or like taking photos of interesting things, you already have an intuitive idea of what a commonplace book is.

It’s a place where you dump snippets, excerpts, reflections, and all sorts of odds-and-ends you’ve gleaned from the world around you. As opposed to a journal, which is more introspective and centered on exploring yourself, a commonplace book looks outward.

It’s backed up by the greats, too–Charles Darwin, Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar, and for closer contemporaries, Bill Gates and Ryan Holiday. Around four hundred years ago, Oxford and Harvard students were required to keep a commonplace book–it was a sign of culture and education.

In the modern context, it offers a place for ideas to cross-pollinate, perfect for when you’re brainstorming or you’re writing an essay where you have to connect the dots.

Produce ten ideas every day

This comes from James Altucher, entrepreneur extraordinaire: to become an idea machine, write down ten ideas every day. The first few ideas will pop naturally into your head, but the lower you go down the list, the more you’ll be straining your brain.

Being an idea machine is worth developing because it gives you super-adaptability. Whatever the situation, however knotty the problem is, you’ll be primed to think of unconventional ways to get around it. You can also vary the list–perhaps today it’s about business ideas, and the next day about recipes involving broccoli.

Most of the ideas might be crappy and quite impractical, but it’s guaranteed that at least a few of those will be diamonds in the rough–and might even lead to a complete business plan once you flesh it out.

People who’ve tried it were skeptical at first–especially since it takes twenty minutes tops. After they’ve soldiered through it, though, they were delighted by the results–mainly an increased ability to create opportunity and the silencing of their inner critic. 

Write and rewrite your most important goals

Aside from getting your creative juices flowing, writing can help you zero in on your goals. When you write down your goals–not just once, but regularly–you’re 42% more likely to achieve them.

Instead of keeping your goals in your imagination, writing them brings them down to earth, so to speak, and makes them more concrete and immediate. This also brings them to the forefront of your mind, so it’s nearly impossible to forget–and you’ll naturally take more action day after day.

Brian Tracy adds a twist to this regular goal-setting practice. Write down your ten most important goals, but don’t copy the list from yesterday.

Surprisingly, what you deem most important won’t stay the same day after day, no matter how long-term you’re thinking. This weeds out your superficial goals–do this for a month, and you’ll gain better clarity on what you really want to achieve.

The post Write Every Day for Motivation and Creativity appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/write-every-day-for-motivation-and-creativity/