Write to Think

Write to think

I find it fulfilling when the blank paper is filled with words magically. I can’t believe those words coming from my brain and I don’t know those ideas exist sometimes. Also sometimes things get really blurry in my head and I want to clear them out, they become more clear when I try to write them down. That’s the motivation for me to write to think more clearly. I think I got inspired by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer, maybe in the book When I Talk About When I Talk About Running, who has also inspired me to run every day in the past ten years.

Writing journey

In the past, I only wrote some journal entries to keep some of my thoughts at the moment. In the past few years, I started keeping notes related to technical references because I keep repeating Google the resources, then I realized I need a better way to do it, so I started to take notes and categorize them. I also got inspired by Ray Dalio’s Principle and thought that it’s indeed a good idea to keep some notes for the principle I care about the most.

“So why are written reports necessary at all? They obviously can’t provide timely information. What they do is constitute an archive of data, help to validate ad hoc inputs, and catch, in safety net fashion, anything you may have missed. But reports also have another totally different function. As they are formulated and written, the author is forced to be more precise than he might be verbal. Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in his presentation. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.” 1

In the past two years, I had a career path change from a Software Engineer to an Engineering Manager, there’s a lot of things that need to be written down, like reports or a summary about certain topics related to Engineering Management that I can use as my own best practices for reference or even sharing with people to discuss it to learn from each other.

Recently, I started writing blogs to share my ideas on certain topics in my domain. The intention is to force me to get clear the idea, a way to learn, e.g. I have to do some research if I’m not sure about something. And I’m trying to develop my own management framework. Sharing those ideas forces me to think and do the right things, which is another strategy to grow. Besides engineering management, I am also interested in various general topics, e.g. growth, struggle, thinking, finding important problems to work on, solving problems, etc. I’d like to share my opinions on those ideas or my own research about those topics, to get some feedback and polish them, to make them my own or others' best practices.

I also noticed that merely writing down all my thoughts on the particular topic can help me structure my “presentation” really well. For example, when there’s a discussion about this topic, I’m able to express my idea really clearly.

Since I have written down a specific topic, some ideas that I might not fully understand at the moment when I wrote them down. But I try to test those ideas out in my life and work, and I have a lot of times that I had some sort of first-encounter case, and finally really feel those ideas in my own experience, that moment is really exciting. And I try to go back to the document and improve that topic by adding my own experience and some other learning. So that specific topic becomes better and better.

A Simple Writing Guideline for myself

  • Don’t have to be perfect. Even one reference link should be good enough for the initial page to get started.
  • Follow the thoughts. Don’t worry the reader. You will get more content and enjoyment from yourself. Let's worry about the reader during editing.
  • Momentum. Keep writing regularly. Produce a certain page per day, e.g. 800-1200 words, or one topic per week.
  • The deadline is productivity. Limit 45m, and make a list of ideas to write the next step. Two topics at the same time. Write two topics at the same time, in case you run out of ideas.
  • Write simply2.
    • Use ordinary words and simple sentences to make them easier to read.
    • Writing goal: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.
    • “The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.”
  • Editing. Whenever I reread my writing, I will find out that there is always something I can improve when I reread, literally every time.

Reference

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. High Output Management, P48 by Andrew S. Grove ↩

  2. Write Simply by Paul Graham ↩