Every time I get a good idea, or an unexpected solution to a problem I’m working on, I feel the urge to immediately write it down — into my phone, onto a piece of paper, into whatever file happens to be open on my laptop. The urge comes from a light but very convincing anxiety: that once my context switches away from this sudden thought, the promising idea will vanish forever. And once I’ve written it down, I feel relief — now, when the time comes, I’ll definitely use it.
But here’s what actually happens most of the time. I never implement the idea. I never even try. I never even open the note. And on the rare occasion that a handwritten note comes back into my field of vision, I sometimes can’t even reconstruct what made me write it down in the first place. Oftentimes rereading such a note I wonder: write an essay about w-what..? — was that a serious thought? Apparently, on a Tuesday in March, it was.
What the research actually says
Recently I came across a study linking the act of writing down information with increased performance. The idea seemed so intuitively obvious that I even wondered who exactly needed to study it. But my second thought was — wait a minute, how come, then, that my written ideas almost never see the light of day again?
After some digging, the research started to make sense — and so did the mystery of the abandoned notes. But let’s start at the beginning, with a Soviet psychologist and a group of waiters who knew exactly what you owed them, right up until the moment you paid the bill.
The Zeigarnik effect
The effect is named after Bluma Zeigarnik, a psychiatrist and psychologist who, sometime in the 1920s, sat in a Viennese café and noticed something odd about the waiters. They could track a number of complex orders and unpaid checks in their heads — who ordered what, who hadn’t paid, who was still waiting on the strudel. But the moment a bill was settled, the same waiters were almost unable to recall anything about the order at all. Intrigued, she designed a series of experiments to study what was going on.
In her work published in 1927, she described an experiment in which a group of children was given a series of simple puzzles and arithmetic problems. After they had completed some of the tasks, they were interrupted for about an hour, and then asked about both the finished and unfinished work. Roughly 110 out of about 140 children had better recollection of the unfinished tasks than the completed ones. In follow-up studies on adults, participants recalled uncompleted tasks about 90% better than finished ones.
Apparently, our brain keeps unfinished business open in a kind of background tab. Finished items gets closed, filed away, and quietly forgotten. The waiters didn’t forget your bill because they had bad memories — they forgot it because, for their brains, the task was done.
For instance, I (almost) perfectly remember at any given moment where my car is parked right now, but I never recall where I parked it the time before.
Cognitive offloading
Because scientists need to look more or less serious in the eye of the general public, they came up with a serious term for writing things down while working on a task: cognitive offloading. There are many studies (here, here, and here) suggesting that externalizing your intentions — writing down the shopping list, the to-do list, the meeting agenda — leads to better performance on the task itself.
What surprised me was that the vast majority of the research in this field focuses on the upside of writing things down: better recall during a task, the well-documented benefits of handwriting over typing for routine memorization, even reductions in procrastination. The conclusion you walk away with reads almost like a postulate: writing things down makes you more productive.
And it does. For a certain kind of task.
Here’s where the Zeigarnik effect quietly walks back into the room. The reason cognitive offloading works so well is, in part, exactly the reason your written-down brilliant ideas die in the notes app: once you’ve written something down, your brain treats it as handled.
The thing is, a shopping list isn’t really a mental task — it’s a to-do list, an algorithm, with nothing left to think about. It’s the end of the thinking process. An idea is the beginning of it. Writing things down to free up working memory is great for a finished solution, and terrible if the goal is to keep a thought quietly developing in the background until it grows into something.
Creative work
Almost all of the experiments showing the benefits of writing things down are designed around simple, routine tasks — remembering lexical sequences, recalling colored shapes, completing arithmetic, getting through a shopping list. By “productivity,” in this context, we essentially mean getting through the necessary boring stuff: paying bills on time, not forgetting your kid’s parent-teacher meeting, remembering that the rental car needs to be returned with a full tank.
Creative work doesn’t behave like that. A half-formed idea about a new product, a hint about why a piece of code keeps failing, the opening line of an essay I haven’t written yet — these things don’t want to be filed. They want to be worked on in the background, often for days or weeks, sometimes while I am doing something completely unrelated. The shower-thought cliché exists for a reason: ideas mature when the brain has permission to keep returning to them.
Writing such an idea down too early does something subtle and slightly nasty. It signals to our brain: handled, move on. The Zeigarnik tension that would have kept the idea alive — that low-grade itch of unfinished business — gets released. You feel relief. You feel productive. And then the idea, instead of quietly growing while you do the dishes, sits in a notes app waiting for a “later” that never arrives. You’ve optimized for not-forgetting at the cost of not-developing.
Boring routines
Our brain loves creative ideas and hates boring routines. The more creative you are, the less routine matters. And let’s be honest — we are terrible at routine work. Take a look at how many books are out there on how to handle the boring stuff: proper time management, self-discipline, waking up early, healthy diets, you name it — while only a handful are written on how to actually be creative.
Truly creative people are famously, almost archetypally, known for their erratic and scattered behavior. Creative ideas overload and dominate their minds, while the routine stuff gets ignored and forgotten. They show by example that once you give your brain permission to disregard the boring stuff, it does so with passion.
Two chess players and a missing dissertation
In 1924, in the ballroom of the Alamac Hotel in New York, Alexander Alekhin — soon to be world champion — played 26 simultaneous games of chess against very strong opponents, including future grandmasters, without sight of any of the boards. He sat in a chair, eyes mostly closed, smoking through what was apparently the better part of a pack of cigarettes, and won 16, drew 5, and lost 5. The next year in São Paulo, the Czech grandmaster Richard Réti pushed the record further: 29 simultaneous blindfold games. By any reasonable standard of human memory, this is absurd.
Alekhin was known for his deeply analytical style, creative attacking play, and profound opening innovations. But he was also notoriously scattered in everyday life. He was once seen trying to dissolve a pawn in his tea as if it were a sugar cube, and on another trip he showed up at a border without a passport.
Réti took this kind of behavior to an anecdotal level — rumor has it that he forgot his math dissertation in a café and never bothered to write another one. Apparently, cloud backups hadn’t been invented yet.
My take
Our mental resources are obviously limited, and even a simple task can easily exceed their capacity. But in light of all the above, I’ve started writing things down only when I want to stop thinking about them. I don’t need the shopping list in my head. I don’t need to keep “pay the utilities by the 15th” running as a background process.
But that creative idea? That half-formed hunch about a project, that strange angle I noticed in a meeting, that opening line that showed up on a walk? I want that to keep running in the background. So despite the anxiety that I’ll forget it, I just notice it and let it stay where it is. I don’t dignify it with a note. I trust that if it’s good enough to keep me, it’ll keep itself.
What I’ve found, somewhat against my own expectations, is that the genuinely useful ideas come back. They show up again in the shower, on the run, in the middle of an unrelated conversation, each time a little more developed than the time before — as if my brain has been quietly working on them while I wasn’t looking. The forgettable ones, the ones that felt urgent at 11 p.m. but turn out to be nonsense by morning, thankfully don’t come back.
I offload the routine and hold onto the interesting. I give the boring stuff a list. I give the good stuff to the back of my mind, and despite some anxiety, trust it to do its job.
And if the idea really was a billion-dollar one, I try not to worry — it’ll come find me again. Probably while I am trying to remember where I parked my car.