Writing is the cure

It sure is. I find that writing about a dilemma solidifies the pros and cons. It's much better to spend a couple of hours at the keyboard, even a day, than to go charging off in the wrong direction. The real problem with going in the wrong direction is the difficulty of backing away from sunk costs. Don't take that to mean that I'm not in favor of a little coding research to get my mind around a problem; it is usually a win.

I have also found that verbal requests, especially from a boss or client, need to be fleshed out in writing. Avoids spending a week on a feature, only to have the client pissed off, because I couldn't read his mind.

Even HN helps. I'm finding that frequent commenting here is improving my ability to capture ideas concisely. (Or so the illusion goes :-)

"Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them." http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html

This is a pretty interesting approach. I have generally used my very infrequently updated blog for recapping something I did that was particularly difficult, or when I completed learning something new. I recently did a post on trying to decide which functional language to teach myself and it had ~1000 uniques (100 times more than my usual posts). More importantly the conversation it generated helped me choose a language.

So blogging before you make a decision can lead to more blogging and better decisions!

There's another thing that may be going on here as well. I usually go to a forum to ask advice on a hard problem. In the act of laying out all the steps I've taken and describing the problem, I generally begin to imagine the replies I may get. You know how it is, people usually ask if you've tried this or that. Any number of 'obvious' solutions are suggested. In an effort to head off those comments I usually end up thinking of an 'obvious' solution I hadn't tried yet, and that generally solves the problem. Failing that, explaining why it can't be this or that issue in the post leads me to think of other possibilities that it COULD be. Nine times out of ten I don't finish the post.

Maybe it also has something to do with the Rubber Duck method: http://lists.ethernal.org/oldarchives/cantlug-0211/msg00174....

Have you ever asked a question and had the answer solution occur to you while you are describing the question? I believe that may be similar. I've heard it said that an explanation for this scenario (speaking to another as a catalyst) may be due to the fact that speaking engages different brain functionality. Both the motor skills of speaking, and the effort to compose the idea and question into a well-composed, meaningful expression.

Separately, with regard to writing, does anyone else notice a difference between writing longhand and typing? For me, whether it's a kinesthetic difference, or that long hand slows me down a bit more so that my thoughts have longer to percolate before being recorded, I find myself more concise and frequently more eloquent when writing long hand. For important things, I'll still sometimes write them out long hand even if their eventual destination is a computer.

What you say or write down also tends to be more strongly remembered than what you just think. (This is the basis for writing down your ideas whenever you get them (speaking them aloud is helpful if you can't stop to write).)

This is why pair programming works so well. In writing things down, asking a question, or explaining things, you have to think about them in a more organized manner.

That is obvious, anyone who had a hard problem knows that just talking through it (or writing it down) helps straighten your own thoughts.