When I am uncertain about something or just have a lot of things on my mind that I want to straighten out, I like to free write. What I do is sit down for anywhere from fifteen minutes to a couple hours, and type as rapidly as possible about the ideas I want to develop develop further. In my case, that's a sustained 90-100+ WPM, so I really bang out the pages!

It's a therapeutic brainstorming session. I don't worry so much about making sense or even spelling things right; the important thing is to keep up the flow of words. I just say whatever comes to mind. Frequently I don't even look at the words I'm typing. It doesn't matter if it's a confused garble in the beginning, because after typing about it for long enough I naturally straighten out my thoughts on the matter. By the end, I have usually focused my thoughts and come up with several new ideas. Additionally, typing constantly requires you to concentrate and pay attention, so by the end I'm also usually much more alert and energetic than I was when I started.

In total, my "thoughts" directory where I store my free writes contains 287,908 words at the moment, spread over more than 70 separate files. Typing at top speed for up to two hours a day does cause some wear on the fingers, so a few weeks ago I purchased an ergonomic Logitech Wave keyboard, which I am very happy with. It has increased my typing speed and soothed my aching hands. It's not one of the unconventional split-keyboard designs so I didn't have to re-learn a new key layout; I was able to reap the benefits of the more ergonomic keyboard immediately.