Rebooting My Writing Practice

This year, one intention I have is to reboot my public writing practice.

In 2023, I learned the same lesson over and over again: writing improves my ability to think.

Early in 2023, I had the privilege of attending the Linking Your Thinking workshop. I went into the experience hoping to learn the one true way to organize my second brain. While that initial hope was severely deflated, I did learn the value of production as it pertains to thinking. Through a series of exercises at the workshop, I saw that the act of encoding ideas/thinking in writing leads to new ideas and new connections between them. If I spend even 30 minutes a day on some sort of writing practice, I find myself spontaneously having more ideas – generally, life gets more interesting. I used to think of my notes as some sacred cache of knowledge I was creating (that no one actually cared about), but now I see my notes as a vehicle for thought.

Additionally, through continuing with my Bullet Journaling practice, I saw that logging my activities, thoughts, questions, and gratitude helped me gain a better perspective on my circumstances and responses. Processing thoughts with logging didn’t make all my problems go away, but it did help me be a bit more present amidst the constant churn of distractions that surround me in daily life.

Finally, as I’ve embraced AI (read: LLMs with a chat interface), I’ve seen that often the largest barrier to getting them to help me in the way that I want is encoding sufficient context regarding my task at hand. I think that for knowledge workers to benefit from generative AI tools, it’s going to mean more writing, not less. I expect that figuring out the right context to encode in writing will be a determining factor for how helpful AI will be for the average knowledge worker as it inevitably continues its explosion onto the market.

I don’t have grand plans for this iteration of my website, but I do intend for it be be an outlet for writing and learning in public.

Here’s to 2024!