The Power of Notes is in the Decision-Making

Image generated using MidJourney with the prompt: Create a photorealistic image of a person sitting in front of a computer with a task management app open. There is also a notebook open in front of the person.

I’m sitting in one of my favorite spots as I write this. It’s a cozy chair in my great room. I have a blanket over my lap and Kona, my faithful miniature double doodle is curled up at my left hip.

Because it’s one of my favorite spots, I’m also surrounded by the little things that collect over the course of a few days — slips of paper, post-it notes, pieces of mail, a magazine with a dog-eared page. Each of these is some sort of note from past me to future me to do something. (I credit my friend R.J. Nestor for the idea of a note being written from past me to future me. He goes into this and much more in his wonderful book The Rhythms of Productivity.) What I’m to do with each of those notes requires a decision to be made. And, for many of us, it’s that decision making where our action-taking stalls out. We gather the notes together but we fail to decide what to do with them and how to remember those decisions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think the decisions we have to make boil down to three decisions about each piece of information.

1. Will I do this thing?
2. Will I do this thing now or later?
3. Where do I put things that I’ll do later?

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at each question.

Will I do this thing?

The first question you have to grapple with is “Will I do this thing?”. Put another way, do you accept that the thing that has come into your life must actually be done — and more importantly done by you. If you’re not going to do the thing, you may still need to decide how you’re going to communicate that decision. Oftentimes, though, deciding not to do something releases the thing entirely from your world.

One of the most classic examples of the need for decision-making about whether you’ll do something with a “note” is the email inbox. In fact, the email inbox is one of the most dangerous types of note gathering tools because it’s typically filled with notes other people have placed in your world and asked or demanded that you do. So, our very first decision has to be, “Will I do this?”

If you work a more traditional 9–5 job and you are thinking about your work inbox, you…