The second brain - The extended mind.
Attention is the most valuable thing in (human?) cognition, as our high level processing throughput is only 10bit/s (see The Unbearable Slowness of Being)
Note-taking makes thinking incredibly efficient, as you can offload details to persistent memory, allowing your brain to focus on what it does best: Figuring out relationships to abstract concepts.
In combination with a note-taking system, this reduces the task of the brain to identify high level relationships and occasionally look up details at various levels of abstraction.
You offload the bloat to your knowledge management-app, only having to memorize memory addresses and a local cache / working memory.
michael levin gets it:
One component to building your own intuition, for having good new ideas, is to show your mind that you’re listening. Again, I have no idea why this works, how generally it works across individuals, or what the mechanism is. All I know is what my experience is and what I’ve suggested to some others for whom it’s worked. The key is that when you get an idea (while jogging, driving, or any other activity), do not let it go and don’t try to just remember it. Write it down somewhere (paper notebook or Evernote software or DevonThink or similar) and go over it later; the key is to get it out of your head, but into a form that preserves it. I’ve noticed that the more you do this, the more the ideas will come. Letting it go and forgetting about it is a signal to your mind that you don’t need ideas; a system that responds to new ideas with a ritual of getting them into a database tends to support their arrival in the future, and frees the creative mind from needing to keep hold of everything in active memory. A close cousin to this is the strategy of offloading all the existing information (ideas, plans, schedules, paper outlines, etc.) into mindmaps, databases, and other tools (see here for more details). I suspect that the more your subconscious believes that the details are safely stored and accessible, the more mind cycles are available for new ideas instead of spending their effort holding on to stuff that’s easily looked up. - src