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Comment by ulisesroche | Hacker News Reader

This kind of stuff is really important. I've done this for about a year now, read about it somewhere, called them Morning Pages, or something like that. It's really a daily brain dump, and I use Evernote to have the entries easily searchable and taggable. I also write right before I go to sleep and for lack of a better name, called them Evening Pages.

Once I got into the habit of doing them, I saw three other benefits: 1) I no longer needed stupid to-do lists, 2) Because I did them right when I woke up, before I was conscious enough to be self-conscious, I was brutally honest with myself, and got rid of my obnoxious depression, and 3) The daily practice really improved my writing.

Journaling really is a better form of meditation. I wish I'd gotten into the habit sooner.

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Yeah, I totally thought of "morning pages"! I came across that idea a couple years ago.

I have always written a lot, but I never did it as religiously as morning pages. I wrote a wiki in 2004 where I keep all my thoughts/notes -- it's about 1000 wiki pages now (probably 2000 without deletions). Before that I kept a diary but it wasn't really for "ideas", more "complaints" :)

Right now I feel like I have enough ideas and it's about execution... but I do think there is something valid to the approach.

It's also similar to what happens when you write down your dreams first thing in the morning (or even during the night if you wake up after them). I tried this when I was 15. My mind was blown.

I started remembering 7 or 8 dreams a night. I would go to sleep for 50 minutes and it would feel like I experienced 8 hours of time in my dream. It was really disorienting (and interesting). I don't remember but I think it took about 2 weeks of writing before that happened.

So this is another example of writing changing your brain. Your brain wants an audience (or more accurately, your subconscious does, and the subconscious is where ideas are generated). If you write down your dreams, you'll start having/remembering more of them. If you write down more ideas, your brain will generate more of them and follow more associations.

I had a similar experience writing a retroactive trip journal after a few weeks through central Europe. In the month after returning home, I'd spend at least 30 minutes (sometimes an hour or more) late at night just brain-dumping everything I remembered from the trip in chronological order. I deliberately wrote stream-of-consciousness style, in the dark, eyes closed, and I was astounded at the level of detail recall I could achieve--not only minute-by-minute, inch-by-inch recollection of events and places, but in slow motion (if I so chose, replayed any number of times), allowing me to re-live the entire trip.

Deliberately plunging my brain back into the places and situations I'd been in recreated the super-stimulated "traveling brain" state. I think the act of reliving and reinforcing the memories made them even more vivid now several years later than they otherwise would have been.

I believe the key aspects of the process were both the deliberate memory churning and the typing--the physical transfer of the brain activity. Maybe my ~80 WPM typing speed happened to be a good match/governor for my recall rate, too.

Now this wouldn't be at all practical on a day-to-day basis since day-to-day life details are so repetitive, but I could for sure see the benefits of picking some out of the ordinary event or encounter and drilling back through it to discover what else your brain has to offer. I can also see the potential in trying it for a known future event for planning purposes.

Very cool, I'm going on a trip soon so maybe I'll try that!

Does it matter whether you actually write in a notebook or on the computer? Because in the book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" the author mentions morning pages as well, so I did it a few times, but it felt a little tiring on my eyes on the computer so I continued in a notebook (and I hate writing in a notebook; I'm very slow.).

I don't think it should matter... but I happened to do it with a paper notebook (since it was 1993!)

I don't think I could write in a notebook anymore -- my handwriting has atrophied and my hand would cramp up... :(

I also used to keep a dream journal; mine was for the purpose of lucid dreaming. Morning pages really make me curious. I saw them recommended in the Pragmatic Programmer's book Refactor your Wetware. Have you found that your wiki lead to measurable improvements in other parts of your life?

> read about it somewhere, called them Morning Pages, or something like that

AFAIK, it comes from Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way".

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