Favorite Way to Capture Nighttime Ideas (so the Ideas Don’t Get Lost)
Five Tips When You Write in the Dark
Hello friends,
Does your brain keep you awake at night with ideas and to do items? Do you wish you had a system to capture those nighttime ideas?
To prepare myself for these conversations, I keep a stack of index cards and rollerball pens on my nightstand.
When my busy nighttime brain jabbers at me, I jot its ideas down on an index card. Then, I toss the index card to the floor beside my bed. After I’ve documented the stream of suggestions from my overactive brain, I tell my brain, “That’s enough ideas for the night.” When my brain chirps, “Wait! I have more to tell you.” I chant “It’s time to sleep” a dozen times. Then my busy brain gets bored and shuts up. And I doze off.
In the morning, I gather the index cards. Over the next few days, I type the ideas.
Some mornings, I wake up to a one-half inch stack of index cards. On those mornings, the index card bundle feels like a package of gifts. Often, I get topics for future articles that I’ll write. But sometimes a random nighttime idea becomes a daytime action that reduces stress in my life. One night, I thought, “Ask the project manager if we can move those two troublesome sections into a new project for next year.” Because I had recorded this fleeting suggestion onto an index card, the next morning, I proposed this plan and the project manager said, “Yes.” This change reduced the scope of my current project which enabled me to finish the project by the end of the month and made that entire month less intense.
Tips for Nighttime Idea Capturing
I’ve had some nights when I got tons of amazing ideas. But I woke up to blank index cards with no words written on them or unreadable handwriting. Those mornings can be heartbreaking or frustrating. Here are tips to make your nighttime notes more legible for your daytime self to type:
Use a rollerball pen, not a ballpoint pen. Choose a bold tip or .7mm pen instead of a fine tip or .5 mm. The thicker the nib, the greater chance the ink will register on the index card. (My favorite pens are R-2 Rollerball Pen or Uniball Vision Elite Stick.)
Grab a stack of index cards and write your ideas on the top one. Better to grab a thicker stack (e.g., 15 cards) than a thinner one (e.g., 3 cards.) When you write on a sturdier surface, you can create enough pressure between the index card and pen nib for the ink to flow on the paper. Flimsy surfaces don’t create enough force for the ink to discharge.
Don’t hold your index card above your pen. If your pen nib is pointing toward the ceiling, ink won’t flow. Ink flows down, not up. Write when the index card is under your pen nib, like you would during the day.
Write big and aim for vertical space in between the rows of handwriting. When I’ve written small and crammed lots of sentences on one index card, the next morning, I discovered that the individual rows overlapped and made it impossible to read my handwriting.
Record ideas slowly or mindfully. Imagine horizontal space in between each letter and each word. During the day, you can scribble down ideas and decipher what your scrawl says. But when your nighttime letters are squeezed together, you’ll be unable to unravel what your writing is trying to say.
When we grapple with problems during our life or in our writing, our subconscious mind continues to tinker away at the situations. Sometimes our brain sends suggestions to us in the middle of the night. If we have a system to record those nighttime ideas, this makes our lives easier. When we wake up, we’ll have index cards listing possible solutions that we can explore.
Warm wishes,
Jenny
This is brilliant Jenny! You're solving what is such a unique, specific, but I imagine common problem. I actually have the items you've named and am going to put them on my bed stand right now.
Purchasing index cards today!!