I blogged last week about Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a book of advice for would-be writers. I finished reading it yesterday. One chapter that resonated with me, called “Index Cards,” describes how Lamott jots down any observations or insights that might later inform her writing.
[W]henever I am leaving the house without my purse . . . I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of worlds to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my finders — as if it has just come back to me — and I take out my index card and scribble it down.
“Capture” is what productivity gurus call this practice of grabbing an idea as soon as it enters our consciousness and getting it written down before it can abandon us. They see it as an essential habit for maximizing our effectiveness. David Allen, author of the 2002 book Getting Things Done, says that our minds are great at coming up with ideas but really bad at keeping track of them. I am one of those who, like Anne Lamott, embrace this practice to its fullest — hence the title of this post.
Lamott is not alone in using index cards as her primary capture tool. Merlin Mann published a blog post in 2004 introducing what he called the “Hipster PDA,” which was simply a stack of index cards held together by a binder clip. My father used index cards too. He always had a stack of them in his shirt pocket and used them to write down phone numbers, book titles, and anything else he wanted to remember.
I was never an index-card guy. Until the late ’90s I used a pocket notebook to jot things down. Then the Palm Pilot came along and I’ve been digital ever since. After about ten years my Palm Pilot gave way to an iPhone. Today I can say, “Hey Siri, remind me to write about using index cards as a capture tool,” and Siri puts it on a list. Actually, I did say that yesterday, and here we are.