Mental Notes
July 28, 2009
A mental note isn't worth the paper it is written on.
You can make mental notes all day long, but they lack the safety features of paper and digital notes. For one thing, you lose them. They exist, but they are floating out there is a closet of cerebral clutter and are only retrieved when looking for something else and usually after a deadline has long expired.
A basic problem with mental notes is that they are subject to the distortions of time. It has been demonstrated by neurological researchers that eye-witness accounts are often unreliable and altered by time and intermingling with other memories.
Perhaps that is why the Bible required two eye-witnesses before a person could be convicted of a capital crime.
Mental notes are often relegated to lists of lesser leverage in our thinking simply because we did not render them important enough at the moment to write them down.
Entrepreneurs eat ideas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Good ideas are worth remembering and writing down. So are not-so-good ideas. They can be sorted out later or even trigger good ideas.
Make a note of that.