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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

The concept of writing to think more clearly might be starting to become trite, particularly if you are a hardcore techie. However I can't overstate how useful this has been for my career and for me personally.

If you haven't written much give it a try. Take some idea that is very clearly formed in your head and put it in paper. I guarantee you'd be surprise how many holes are in your thinking once you try to lie it down.

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I would argue otherwise. If you are a hardcore techie, you should soon realize that a man without paper, is like a Turing machine with finite or no tape.

I never understood the statement sometimes made of rushing in and just outputting stuff without thinking and writing -- goes contrary to our engineering, informatics and scientific training I would like to argue. I do understand of course the need for experimentation/having the tires hit the road.

P.S. I find I need to write more and these comments and post helps remind me that, so I grasp the opportunity to thank all the commenters for that.

> P.S. I find I need to write more

You're doing just fine :)

It’s not so much in contradiction with a scientific background/training: you’ll still need to go through prototypes, drafts, rough ideas expressed before you can share/observe/analyse them.

Creatively speaking (and writing is a creative endeavor, whatever the topic is), rushing in is like letting your mind breathe freely and empty it from what’s bothering it, so it can put it all out, and then allow it to focus/develop.

In writing the cost of pen/paper is marginal, so you can afford it extensively.

Related: the creativity faucet, https://twitter.com/Julian/status/1402356373648601089?s=20&t...

Any software design of any significance I've ever done has occurred while writing my half baked thoughts. I didn't even know they were half baked until I started to write it down and felt the struggle to plug all the holes. The design was truly in all those holes.

The rubber duck method works wonders for me, especially while writing. "When I show this to the head architect, he's going to rip into me here, here and.. here"

Same concept as rubber duck debugging.

Kind of but writing has the added benefit of being easily inspectable after fact. Speaking out loud will identify some weak logical points, but writing will catch even more.

This is a big reason why asynchronous communication works better for me. I can't begin to count the number of problems I've solved in the process of writing an email asking for help. And many more times where the question I was intended to ask changed to a completely different, and more useful question. The process of collecting the information I have, ended up pointing to holes in my thought processes and led to the solution.

If I had gone straight to Slack I would have wasted other people's time, and cheated myself out of thinking through the problem myself.

My employees don't seem to understand why I prefer they email questions to me instead of calling. The clarity writing often brings aids the conversation. I frequently call once I have the email.

Very true. Email forces you to compose rather than emit streams of consciousness.

And composing often leads to solutions even before you press Send.

https://mobile.twitter.com/b0rk/status/1546875361002135554?r...

I think the key here is that by putting it to paper (so to speak), you linearize and structure the problem and all it angles in a way that are conducive to methodically advancing your understanding.

I don't take laptops into (real) meetings anymore, just my Moleskine and a pen. Has helped tremendously with thinking through problems and giving better feedback later on.

I find the process of hand-writing notes, rather than typing them, helps me to remember the details that I've noted down. I don't often refer back to my notes, but that's kinda because I hand wrote it, and so there's some kind of visceral mind-body connection that seems to help in remembering.

Okay! This is fascinating, I've long meant to dig into the relationship between writing and memory.

I do also think if you were to revisit a specific note, you might find something interesting along the way—a fascinating byproduct of writing physical things down is sorting through all of the texture before and after it. https://twitter.com/HerbertLui/status/1564087803029630976

I do exactly the same, except I use a Rhodia or Clairefontaine pad, because Moleskines suck with liquid ink.

I've noticed a massive difference when note-taking on paper.

A great antidote for illusion of explanatory depth? Writing

As others have mentioned in the thread, you only start to realize how little you know (or how much) about a particular subject once you start putting words to paper. It's a great way to "test yourself" and — as objectively as possible — identify gaps or holes in your knowledge.

> Take some idea that is very clearly formed in your head and put it in paper.

For me the idea is always half formed in my head, it becomes clear only when I begin to write it down.

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