This applies to emails as well. The other day my team ran into an issue late at night, with an impending launch the next day. One teammate handed the issue off to me at 2 AM her time and I needed to figure out how the team should proceed the next morning (before I would be awake).
I just started writing an email with our goals, what the obvious options were, how the options mapped onto the goals, what other contingencies might arise, etc. Through the course of writing the email it became pretty clear what the best option was, and what the fallback option would be in the likeliest contingencies.
As I was describing the situation to my kid the next day, I told her that sometimes when we write things down in emails or letters, it's just as much for distilling our own thoughts as it is about communicating with others.
The past few years have been a really wild journey for me that have led me to lean heavily into text and writing things down, like everything, all the time.
Here are a bunch of things I've learned in no specific order.
* Writing engages the pre-frontal cortex and suppresses activity in the amygdala. Net psychological effect of this is you become more rational, more methodical, more relaxed, less anxious/fearful
* Cognitive behavioral therapy has the best evidence for efficacy among the "talk therapies," and it's pretty much just a framework for writing down your negative assumptions and analyzing them, this helps you figure out which ones are correct and which ones aren't
* Certain software tools are essentially just environments which lower the friction of working with text buffers, emacs is probably the purest example of this philosophy, any code editor is an example, so are the 'second brain' apps like Obsidian or logseq, arguably a terminal is also an example
* Things we write when transformed to the correct format can change the outside world, e.g. you wrote down a piece of information and then later formatted it as an email or a blog post or as some code which you deployed and now the world outside is closer to what you want it to be, these transformations are potentially macros that you've written in text and versioned somewhere.
It's a radically different approach to thinking and computing than the mental model most people are walking around with in their head. Thinking as writing and writing as execution. Everything starts in the brain, write it down and loosely organize it, over time transform it into your work products, communication with others etc. We are simply moving thoughts down the pipeline from brain to reality, all through the same process, same simple set of tools etc. It is very very powerful for producing high quality ideas and outcomes in my experience.
This reminds me: some of the best "therapy" is to react to something in a draft email (with no recipient), then close it, walk away. Come back at some point and see if what you wrote makes any sense, needs to be communicated, or should be avoided altogether.
I find my initial writing almost never aligns with what needs to be done. But the process of writing it - in a reactive state or not - helps clarify that decision and slow it to the right (or a better) outcome.
I often synthesize this as: to write, is to think.
It derives from David McCullough's quote, "Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."
In order to arrange the right words in the right sequence to convey the right message, you're required to organize your thinking, and also consider how it might be consumed.
To bring it back home, I suppose the same could be said of writing code.
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As an aside, McCullough wrote my favorite biography, John Adams.
Came back from the article to post his quote, and here it is. Moving knowledge outside yourself crystallizes that knowledge. It makes me wonder what happens when LLMs strip that away for most people.
I just started writing an email with our goals, what the obvious options were, how the options mapped onto the goals, what other contingencies might arise, etc. Through the course of writing the email it became pretty clear what the best option was, and what the fallback option would be in the likeliest contingencies.
As I was describing the situation to my kid the next day, I told her that sometimes when we write things down in emails or letters, it's just as much for distilling our own thoughts as it is about communicating with others.