For absolutely best security, you would change your password to a new, extremely long, randomly generated character string every time you logged in. What the best security options are, and what users are willing/able to put up with has a very small, if any overlap.
As for writing them down, my advice is to obfuscate them. Apply your own secret code to the password, hide it in a poem, get creative. Once an attacker is at your desk, they pretty much own your shit. At that level, the only thing your password is providing is privacy, not security.
Until the password manager gets compromised, or you lose access to your PW manager. In that case, you'll really wish you had implemented "Zone 3" of my plan.