Decoding life, one bullet point at a time

So here’s the deal: I find it difficult to plan and execute things.

My inability to get started causes issues in all areas of my life: What shall we do at the weekend? What shall I buy my relatives for Christmas? How do I start this work task?

I don’t have answers for all of these problems, but at work, where I’m good at drawing up a list of the tasks that need completing, I’ve found a trick that more often than not gets me results. It involves writing.

I write a work diary. Sometimes I write it in insane detail, to the point where others literally scratch their heads and express incomprehension at the depth of information it contains. But I’m well known for being quirky at work, so I tend to get away with oddness like this.

Whilst others may see my frantic note taking as odd, it really does serve a hugely important purpose in my time at work.

It is an enabler for me. The simple action of writing down what I am doing has the effect of translating the task into something that I can understand.

In short, it decodes my life, one sentence at a time.

Here’s how it works:

  • I outline.
  • Put simply, I use an indented bulleted list, one sentence per bullet point.
  • A point that is logically a child or continuation of the previous point, is further indented, like this
  • Outlining presents me with a list
  • Lists are easily decoded by me
  • Lists provide the right sized chunks of info for me to decode in one go
  • Lists give a logical structure to what is often unstructured information
  • Bulleted lists allow detail to be added out of sequence
  • When something occurs to me, I can go back and add it in the right logical location
  • I can do that without breaking the flow of the list
  • I did just that in the writing of this list
I’ve been using the above technique for a couple of years now, and I can’t express how amazed I am at the power it provides me with to decode and make sense of things.
For example, if I can’t figure out where to start on a problem at work, I’ll start to outline what I know.
This action of writing and of breaking the problem down into small chunks triggers new thoughts and ideas involving areas to look at and things to try. I’ll try those, and note once again what I found. The act of noting will usually lead to further thoughts and further things to look at. Often in no time at all, I have a solved issue, and along the way written in-depth notes of how the problem was debugged and what fixed it.
The note taking has not only helped me to reach the solution, it has also lead to me documenting what has happened, in a form that can be used by others in future. When my colleagues aren’t scratching their heads at the apparently insane level of detail of my notes, they are often thanking me for them, as they have helped them to solve a problem that they were seeing.
I don’t think the trick here is actually the use of my own style of outlining – that is just the using the right tool for the job. The real trick here is the translation of what I know through the medium of writing. There is something almost magical about writing what I know. It turns the unordered jumble of disconnected thoughts in my head into something that is ordered and structured. It decodes life.
Now, if only I could find a way to start writing on those days where my executive function tells me that I can’t write…

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