This page is part of the MAQTOOB Heritage archive. The essay described here appeared on MAQTOOB for Entrepreneurs, the Medium publication run by this domain’s original team between 2015 and 2018. The current site is under new, independent ownership and is not affiliated with the original company or the essay’s author. We keep this record because other sites still link to the essay at this address.
What the Essay Said
Jane Lee wrote this on October 4, 2016, while building The Stockroom, Shopify’s own ecommerce store. Buried in a million tasks, she noticed that the successful store owners she interviewed kept coming back to the same habit: they wrote things down.
The essay collected the research on why journaling works, from clearing working memory so the brain stops rehearsing open tasks, to the evidence that writing goals down makes people measurably more likely to reach them. Gratitude and productivity bloggers still quote its line that writing is scientifically proven to be more powerful than simply thinking the same thoughts.
Read the Original
The author keeps the essay on Medium: read it here.