No milk for your cereal?

The creativity and analytical abilities of your brain are some of your most valuable assets. Unfortunately, most people squander their brains' true potential by consistently having the same thought more than once. How many times do you have to remind yourself to buy milk the next time you're at the grocery store? This also applies to when you are trying to solve a problem. Usually the best ideas come to mind after your brain has had time to subconsciously think about the problem for a while. How many times do you keep thinking of that great idea until you can finally put it into action? Or how many times do you get stuck on one possible solution and can't think of anything else because your mind keeps coming back to the same idea?

Even worse than having a thought more than once is having a great thought one moment and then forgetting it the next. How many times have you come up with a solution to a personal problem right before falling asleep and then wake up the next morning without the foggiest clue of what you had come up with the night before? And then how much time do you waste trying to remember what you had forgotten?

Jot that down.

The easiest and best solution to both of these problems is to simply write down everything important the second it comes to mind. Once you develop a system that you can trust, such as a proper to-do list and calendar, you'll never have to worry about forgetting anything or having the same thought more than once. An old saying especially rings true about this: the weakest ink is greater than the strongest memory. If you can get in the habit of writing things down and keeping yourself organized, you'll eventually unleash newfound productivity and you may even begin to wonder how you were forgetting things in the first place.

A side note:

This doesn't completely apply to happy or reminiscent thoughts. Of course you will want to have these thoughts more than once, but it still doesn't hurt to write all of these thoughts down on a separate list (especially for those times when you need a little pick-me-up.)

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