Writing notes helps you remember — and forget

Despite the em dash in the title, this blog post is 100% human powered. Apparently these days the use of em dashes is an indication that something is AI slop and I can promise you, the shortcomings and grammatical errors of this blog post are purely my own, no algorithms were needed to create them and no rain forests were destroyed to process them.

Writing notes helps me remember things.

When I write something down, I process it an extra time in my brain while turning an abstract idea into tangible writing. Sometimes that’s enough to remember it for a long time. (The only time I ever tried to cheat in school was when I wrote down the year 1323 for Treaty of Nöteborg for an exam in elementary school and I still remember it.)

If I don’t remember it by heart, my notes remember it for me and thus I can go back and find things that I’ve deemed worthy of remembering.

But it also helps me forget. If there’s something that keeps bothering me and steals my (very sparse) brain cycles — usually for worrying purposes —, writing it down tells my brain it’s okay to let it go. I do this often with my journal into which I pour my worries.

It’s wonderful how it works both ways.