My wife and I had a rare lunch outing this week.  How did it happen?  Well, I realized I’d gotten everything there was to get from the seminar I was sitting in on, so I skipped out at 11:33 sharp—just in time to drive 20 minutes across the city and surprise Missy as she left the dentist office—which was conveniently located on the same block as one of my Top 5 sushi restaurants.

Okay, so why did I need to offer you “how” it happened in the second sentence?  Well, with four kids, private lunches don’t come easy.  Which is why I told you in the first sentence it was “rare”.  

After lunch we went to our favorite coffee shop and split a latte.  Am I cheap?  No, I just didn’t want you thinking I’d have a whole “girl drink” to myself (I don’t watch Dancing with the Stars voluntarily, either).   

Anyway, while I sat in the sun and finished off my third of the coffee, Missy went into the Anthropologie shop around the corner.  Her mission was unclear to me, and I didn’t ask for details.  Sitting there with nothing to do was good enough for me.

Ten minutes later she emerged with two pieces of news: One, she’d broken a lamp while she was in there, and two, she had a present for me.  She presented a small brown box, accompanied by a smile.

As we walked slowly down the sidewalk, I opened the box.  Inside, thoroughly wrapped in tissue, was a package that contained two small, pocket-size green notebooks.  Actually, to call these “notebooks” is a little like calling Lance Armstrong a “bicycle rider.”  But since you understand this now, I’ll go ahead and call ‘em notebooks anyway.

They were two shades of green (I guess so you can tell which is which) and they were “Moleskines”.  The slip of paper with them explained that moleskine has been the drawing board for the likes of Hemingway, van Gogh, and Picasso, and that sometime several decades ago, it went out of production.  The company that makes the ones Missy bought me resurrected them in 1997—so here they are,  back and available for creative (or forgetting) minds everywhere.

“You’re always writing stuff down on the go, so I thought you’d like to have these,” she said.  “And they’ll fit in your pocket,” she added.  Which was the best feature, I thought; an even bigger selling point than the moleskine bit.  Sometimes the best gifts are the little, impromptu ones, and though she says I’m “hard to buy for” Missy manages to spot the coolest stuff for me on a regular basis.

Okay, so what’s all this have to do with “Mental Outsourcing”?  Or maybe a better question, “What the heck is Mental Outsourcing?”  

I guess the best explanation of it starts with a story I heard about a man who asked Albert Einstein for his phone number some 80 years ago.  Al reached into his shirt pocket, took out a notepad, and read it off.  A disbelieving man who watched this asked Einstein if he really didn’t know his own phone number, to which he replied:  “I never clutter my mind with information I can find easily find elsewhere.”

Einstein was a bonafide genius, which has a different meaning than what’s assumed by most people.  A genius doesn’t bother with the unnecessary, but only does what has meaning. Doing less is doing more.  Simplicity isn’t laziness, it’s a way to make room for the meaningful.

I’m no Einstein, but I’ve been in the habit of writing stuff down for a long time.  It’s not that I’m so organized—in fact, my tendency is to be very un-organized, a condition I fight daily—it’s just that I learned this early on:  The most profound, clever, and unforgettable idea WILL BE FORGOTTEN if it’s not written down.  

Some days are better than others, but ideas are popping into my head all the time.  Sometimes even at night in bed.  And when they do—even at night—I write them down.  

In fact, this is exactly how I wrote my first book, Conquering Deception© a few years back.  I wrote ideas on the backs of receipts.  On scraps of grocery sacks.  On cardboard boxes.  I wrote down my best thoughts as they occurred, on whatever was at hand, long before I’d even heard of moleskine notebooks.  After a while, I had a shoe box full of notes.  Then I organized them into one list.  Then I sorted them by subject, then into what would become chapters for the book.

The reason some fall victim to “writer’s block” is that they’re sitting down and trying to force creative thought.  That’s hard to do.  But if that same person makes simple notes as profound thoughts occur, they’ll have a gold mine of stuff to draw on.

Here’s the deal:  You can decide to sit down and write, but you can’t decide to be creative.  Creativity is like a perfect sunset, it comes when it comes.  Your only say in the matter is to notice when it does.  

If you have something you’d like to write—a book, a screenplay, an article, a blog post, a presentation—that takes creative thought, you probably have ideas coming to you when you’re not in the act of writing.

Capture the creative thoughts as they come, then flesh them out when you have time to write. This is the greatest path to great writing, the one technique that no one talks about, the one that all the greats have secretly relied upon.

It’s been said that everyone’s got a book in them.  If that’s true, they’re writing it day by day without even knowing it.  And what happens to their masterpiece?  It’s lost, vaporized, it passes away like the wind, simply because they don’t take the time to capture it.

My new notebooks have a spot inside the front cover for my name and contact info, even a place to put a reward.  The idea is to put a dollar amount, of course, but the real value of having my fleeting ideas down on paper?  Priceless.

Outsource your mind to a little piece of paper, let the notepad do the work, and free yourself up for the other stuff in your day.  The paper will wait for you patiently, and the masterpiece you hope to write will “write” itself… piece by piece.

Tags: outsourcing, Time Management

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.