Why I Write and Why You Should Too

Writing extends our capabilities in life and at work.

Source: Unsplash

One blog post that has been in my re-read list is Steve Yegge’s “You should write blogs” published more than a decade ago.

This post doesn’t apply to writing blogs only. It reminds me to deliberately write down anything noteworthy as I go on with my day. I’d encourage you to do the same.

When to write and why

When in a meeting and you want to make sure that no important action items fall through the cracks, write them down (works well in bullet points).

When you have an idea or a burst of ideas that came out of nowhere (sometimes while taking a shower or even during sleep while dreaming), write them down.

When you are assessing different ways to break down a piece of work, write them down.

When you or your direct report delivered results that meet or exceed your organisation’s competency framework, write them down.

The list could go on…

What’s common knowledge to us might not be common knowledge to everyone else.

What we write that feels obvious to us can be useful to others. Even if nobody reads them yet, you took a snapshot of your thoughts. Thoughts that you or someone else might find useful to accomplish a task or reach a goal.

Did you ever have one of those moments when you said to yourself: “I’m glad I wrote this down.”?

You’re welcome.

Some ideas are better formulated when you write them down. What you write could be an essential part of what might become a blog post or even a book. It could help someone else make a sensible system design decision, a “build versus buy” decision or a big life decision, next week or in a year or so from now.

One example

About a week ago, I was asked by a colleague in our Shenzhen office about the roll out of engineering on-call for our teams in Singapore where I am currently based. Luckily, we wrote a document for that with the high-level and detailed plans. The document was only useful to us in Singapore office a year ago. Now that our Shenzhen office is planning to have their own engineering on-call, they might find that document useful.

Information overload

It’s fair to ponder: There’s already too much information for us to consume in the form of emails, blog posts, social media, instant messages, books and documents. Why do we have to add up to that?

I believe one counter to that paradox will be writing. What if for example we make it a habit to write down a summary, a note or an actionable checklist of what we consume, that will help us organise our thoughts and filter out what we don’t need. I know I’m making it sound somewhat utopian but this can be another topic. We can write more about it.

Keep writing

Our brains have good processors and caching with limited storage space. We are already capable of horizontally scaling or extending that storage space by writing down our ideas in papers or computing devices. There is this low bandwidth that we have to live with between our brains and our devices.

A big part of this low bandwidth is writing until we can find better ways of removing this bottleneck in sending our cognitive output to these devices.

For now, it’s best for us to keep writing.