A tool for clarity in our biggest life decisions

If you visited the Acuff house during the writing of this book, you’d probably be surprised by the dining room.

Although it’s usually a fairly neat space, for three months it looked like the lair of a mad scientist. I didn’t have beakers because that’d be weird and I’d probably have to order them online from a strange beaker company that would send me catalogs for the rest of my life.

But I did have notes covering every wall.

It didn’t start out that way. Initially, I did all my work on a laptop trying to outline everything in one massive Word document.

It was fine at first, but the more I added to the outline, the harder it got to keep up. I couldn’t quickly find what I had hidden in Chapter 3 or understand how Chapter 6 was going to resolve. It was a frustrating exercise of scrolling and misplacing ideas.

Finally, after probably our fiftieth confusing conversation, my wife, Jenny, had had enough. She grabbed something from the kitchen drawer, slammed it on the table like we were playing suburban dominos and said, “There!”

I stared at the table and laughed: note cards.

Of course, it always comes back to note cards.

For years, we’ve used note cards to gain clarity in our biggest life decisions. If you want to map something out, there is no greater tool. Great thinkers the world over have known that forever.

Source: Do Over: Make Today the First Day of Your New Career by Jon Acuff