🧠 Recent Data Shows How Busy Minds Can Stay Creative
The Checkpoint
A weekly newsletter to rest, reflect, and level up your life
💙 I help people navigate life in a much more conscious way. If you feel like life is a never-stopping race, this is the place you need.
SHARE
• By Daniel Robledo
🧠 Recent Data Shows How Busy Minds Can Stay Creative
read time: 3 minutes
Welcome back to The Checkpoint, a newsletter where, every Monday, we pause, reflect, and level up our lives.
☑️ Today's Summary:
I explore whether I'm a note-taking maniac or actually a creative person leveraging my brain's capacity
Current Psychology 2023 research article shows how bad it is for your brain to store much information
I tell you how I've built my note-taking system and share tools, templates, and a step-by-step guide to building your own
📝 The Note-Taking Conundrum
Hey Reader!
Yesterday, during my usual Weekly Review, I was going through all my notes from the week. And wow, I noticed just how many notes I had — not just the quantity, but how ridiculously spread out they were:
A Notion page for quick notes
A pinned Google Keep note for voice recordings on my phone
THREE notebooks: one in my room, one in my backpack, and one... in my trousers pocket
Scrambled notes in Todoist, my calendar, and even random .txt files
My Notion note-taking system
This got me thinking: do I actually have a problem, or is this kind of scatterbrained note-taking legit? (Okay, fine, my organization obsession could use some work. No surprise there. 😬)
After diving into some articles, I stumbled upon a 2023 study from Current Psychology. They explored how cognitive overload — basically, trying to store too much info in your brain — impacts creativity and idea generation for knowledge workers (a.k.a. people like you and me). Here’s what they discovered:
Overloaded Brain = Distracted Mind: When people feel mentally overloaded, they turn to distractions like aimless web browsing (“cyberloafing”). Weirdly, this sometimes led to useful problem-solving daydreams — but only up to a point.
Sweet Spot for Creativity: If your brain’s too cluttered, creativity tanks. The best creative output happens when your mind isn’t completely clear, but also isn’t drowning in tasks. It’s all about finding balance.
Results from the study
The way I see it, the goal isn’t to completely empty your mind but to keep it clear enough to spark new ideas consistently. That’s where the “note-taking madness” comes in.
For me, having two or three quick places to dump my thoughts has been a lifesaver. My best ideas rarely come from sitting down and trying to force brilliance. They usually pop up when I’m revisiting some messy, two-line note I scribbled down five days ago while in the bathroom.
💡How to apply this concept TODAY:
If you want to harness the power of the constant idea-generation method, you should tackle two things:
1 - Create a quick capture system for taking notes when you are walking, working, reading, and even bathing (your phone’s voice-to-speech feature is your best friend here).
2 - Set aside 15 minutes each week to review (and for-god-sake delete) all your notes. Process them and store only the useful ones.
🎁 Free Resource: If you want to use the same Notion system that I use, here is a cheeky template.
✍️ Week's Quote
“
Life is a constant stimulation of the brain; inhale experiences, exhale wisdom.
— Uncle Iroh
❤️ Favorites Of The Week
🕹️Videogame
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Remake
If I could completely forget a game and play it blind again, it would be this one. I'm happy to be alive at the same time this remake was made.
Being organized with your notes is not only good for your creativity but also for your work. An organized person is reliable, confident, and much more tranquil. Be that person.