on writing

i tweeted ↗ recently that my highest leverage habit is writing things down consistently.

i spend a lot of my weekends or mornings reviewing notes, appending to existing ones, creating new ones. a lot of it is journal-style note-taking, but it's also thinking through topics by writing it down. i try to do more and more of the latter.

why write

writing things down makes me think.

it allows me to effectively do the following, with any idea or problem that i'm wrangling with:

• understand
• identify
• progress

i'm not trying to create a new theorem. if anything, i'm trying to make sense of my thinking, and of my writing habit. what i've found is that by forcing myself to type it all out — be it a thought, a concept, something that someone said, a problem — helps me understand it better. i'm manifesting it on a digital piece of paper, after all. i identify things: what's the context here? who was involved? i can dive deeper, see if there's edge-cases, unknowns, people, or topics connected to it. and then, effectively, i can do stuff with my writing.

it's useful when working through complicated feature sets at work. it's useful for mapping out dependencies. it's useful for laying out goals, corner cases, or make highlights before jumping into, say, Figma.

it took some time, but now i understand this meme as well:

i was guilty of it myself — when notion came out, i'd spend way too much time optimising my setup. what the color of a tag should be is highly irrelevant, what matters is actually writing things down. and apple notes is fantastic as that.

but, apple notes is effectively... well, it's the equivalent of writing something on a loose piece of paper that i'll lose anyway. or throw away, eventually. part of me also just hates the fact that I can't set a default typeface for the notes.app on macOS, but that's another story.

just write

the day i started actually writing consistently is when i stopped caring about structure, and i just typed. it also just doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter for how long, it just matters that you write.

writing helps create connections.

one thing i do regularly by now is review my week (for a more elaborate way of doing it: see ben's post ↗). deliberately kept simple: i write down things that went well, REALLY well, and that need to improve. i review my calendar, screentime (i use rescuetime for this), sometimes my things.app logbook, and see if there's anything else that was noteworthy. some weeks, i'll add more thoughts towards the end of it. again: this helps me understand. i can immediately see if there's something i should be spending more or less time on, and change as necessary. also... i just enjoy reflecting, and writing.

what's particularly fun by now: i have a proper digital logbook of my thoughts over time -- it's pretty easy to say "hm, when i was in that particular mood last time?" and just search for it. because i'll find a note, i'll find connections, and i'll probably be able to use it.

note-making

i'm hesitant to even publish this, because of how en vogue "tools for thought" have been recently. but writing as a practice has helped me gain lots of clarity. i enjoy sitting down with my macbook open and just typing. it's cathartic, in a way.

it can be any concept or topic i'm interested in. it can be creating lists. it can just be adding to my daily note. i do my best to not create too many transient notes — but rather, evolving ones. (for more reading: see Linus on incremental note-taking ↗). or really concise, to the point explanations of things (see Andy Matuschak on Evergreen notes ↗). i can form connections that way, instead of ending up with a large pile of throwaway notes from "that one meeting". (don't get me wrong, i create those too)

i'm trying to make my note collection a growing vault of mini-essays, ideas, concepts, and an archive of thoughts. in the end, it helps me think.

lastly, but most importantly: write for yourself ↗. that's why i don't write here all too often... yet.

"I wrote. For free. For nobody. For myself. For the love of the craft."