Everything I've achieved in life, I owe it to this simple lifehack.

Today, I noticed something spectacular when creating a Trello board. But, before I tell you what it was, let me give you some context.

I am the king of building castles in the air. I have got that market cornered. I conjure up hundreds of ideas to work on daily. Every time I meet friends, I turn into a passionate evangelist for an idea that'll make us billionaires for sure. However, I seldom work on those ideas even when I firmly believe in their potential.

So now you'll understand my astonishment when I realized that I had deployed 90% of the product ideas that I was tracking through Trello boards. Those that I didn't launch were the ones I was working on with someone else. So is using Trello the grand lifehack? Nope.

Paul Grahm recently published an essay about writing. He said that writing is an excellent tool to untangle your thoughts about a particular topic. I couldn't agree more. In my personal experience, when I write about something, my brain uncovers hidden dimensions that would have been impossible to appreciate if I was passively thinking about the subject. But writing endows you with another superpower.

When you type or write down a task, you increase your chances of actually finishing it. Look, I am no psychologist; I can't explain the mechanics behind why creating a to-do list increases our propensity to complete pending tasks. However, I have a theory:

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with improving my memory. During that phase of my life, I read a book (ironically, I can't remember its name) that claimed that the more senses we involve while learning something, the better our recall and retention becomes. This is why just the memory of writing a task, strengthened by our sense of touch and sight, coerces us to complete it.

So that's it. Want to get something done? Just type or write it down. Simple.