If you are looking for to do list software, you have a myriad of
options to choose from. Some of the most well regarded to do list
managers floating around the Internet are Remember the Milk, Toodledo,
Google Calendar’s Task list, and Ta-Da List. Each of them seems to have a
gadget that you can integrate into your web browser or into an iGoogle
page so that you can see your to do list at regular intervals as you
work at your computer.
If it’s so convenient, why can’t I recommend some such system?
I love technology and gadgets. But digitizing this particular
function — I just don’t have the heart for it. Personally, I find that I
need to write my to do lists. I enjoy the feeling of physically
crossing things off my list on a piece of paper. I’ve experimented with
different kinds of to do lists. There’s the simple master list that
holds everything. There’s the approach of making different lists for
each day of the week and categorizing tasks according to when they must
be done. Most recently, I’ve experimented with the GTD (Getting Things
Done) system of using context-based lists, such as @phone, @email, @
car, @home, @travel, etc. Even that system is customized based on the
assumption that everyone will want to digitize their lists — hence the @
symbol, which is partially intended to pull the to do list to the top
of an electronic folder that is organized alphabetically.
But I don’t put my context lists on my computer, my phone, or my
iPad. I write them on sheets of paper and file them in a three-ring
binder. Why?
It just is so much more effective for me to write things down on a
physical list. I didn’t know why, so I looked it up. It turns out that
the act of physically writing causes chemical changes in the brain — my
brain, your brain, anyone’s brain. Here’s why:
1. Storing memories in more than one way helps us to remember.
When I write something down on my to do list, I store it, in a sense,
in two ways — visually and kinesthetically, by using the muscles in my
arm, hand, and fingers to write. If I read the list out loud to myself,
I’ve now stored in it in two more ways, by speaking and listening. I am
now far less likely to forget the items on my list. If I store the list
in my computer, even if I then migrate it to my phone, I still am
storing it in just one way, as letters on a screen — eminently
forgettable.
2. Reading and writing rewires our brains.
Neurologists are beginning to realize that adult brains are far more
plastic, and more similar to the brains of children, than we commonly
assume. Far from being set in stone, our brains are changing and
evolving all the time, as we, like our children, learn new things.
Studies of what happens in children’s brains, as they read and write,
may well apply to us adults as well, and to what happens in our brains
when we read and write.
Neurologists are just beginning to use brain imaging studies to find
out what happens in a child’s brain during the process of becoming
literate. It turns out that the quality of the brain’s white matter —
the tissue that carries signals between areas of gray matter — improves
substantially when children learn to read — a process that typically
occurs side by side with learning to write. (See, for example, ìFirst
evidence of brain rewiring in children: reading remediation positively
alters brain tissue,î Science Daily, When children learn to write in cursive, other things happen in the
brain. The translation of the sequences of symbols (letters) into lines
on paper affects the cognitive ability of the brain — it presents the
brain with a challenge because each letter connects slightly different
to every other letter each time that it is written. Neuroscientists say
that as children learn to write cursive, they become better speakers and
readers. Writing in cursive, but not printing, does this — so maybe
it’s best to write that to do list in cursive. I certainly do!
But it’s not just the act of writing that affects the brain. Reading
cursive handwriting — our own or anyone else’s — uses the same part of
the brain that recognizes faces — and we can have an emotional response
to handwriting, just as we can to a face. Looking at handwriting
activates in the brain a process called a ‘memory trace’ a biochemical
change that causes a domino effect (if you’ll forgive my mixing of
metaphors) throughout the rest of the brain, setting off other memories.
That means that simply seeing an item that I wrote on a to do list can
trigger a whole chain reaction of other memories related to that item
and what I was thinking and feeling when I wrote it. No wonder a
physical handwritten to do list seems so much more meaningful to me! I
just can’t get the same satisfaction from clicking a box on a computer
screen.
Perhaps my final reason for preferring writing on paper is frivolous, but here goes:
3. Writing with a good pen on good paper is physically
pleasurable — it adds a moment of pure enjoyment to a day that may be
filled with otherwise mundane tasks. As Toronto reporter
Andrea Gordon puts it, ‘I luxuriate in feeling the pen on paper the way a
cook relishes sticky dough on his fingers.’
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