The habit of writing things out
In my experience, personal development has improved the quality of my life. It has surprisingly led making some positive progress. There are many valuable habits that can be picked up, but writing things out has been surprisingly helpful. This differs from taking notes which is very important; the memory can fade; ideas get lost. Here the focus is on writing things down, thinking things through on paper and having a record to refer to.
This is a personal reflection on my experience, and I hope that you can make some use of it in your life.
The value of writing
I cannot say that every decision that I write out will work out; my logic can be extremely flawed. A person can only know so much; there are many uncertainties and unknown unknowns in our lives. Our limited knowledge and experience are increased with our learning and growing; time and experience gives new knowledge and learning that life feeds back to us. We hope this new knowledge inculcates into our lives; giving more knowledge, expertise and hopefully broadening and improving our perspectives.
Although life comes out of left field with plenty of curve balls, through this noise, there is our personal goals and maybe a vision. A set of common aims, leading us towards our dreams; our lives as we would like them. But is the visualisation of our success; our patient and continuous building of momentum towards our goals, the reality? Is this aligned with our actual decisions; or is this what we would like our decision to be? Is our mind playing tricks with us?
Well, how would we know? How much do we remember about our daily decisions and why we made them? What about our big decisions? What was our criteria? Did it make sense? Does it, given our increased life knowledge, make sense today? Are we missing something and is our biases and unconscious scripts leading us astray?
The case for writing things out
This is where the writing come in. Writing things down at least captures the moment — the decision in action; not the decision after the fact. We capture the essence then, not replaying this for our memories to piece things together from scattered thoughts in future reflection. Yes, we may have biases, we may fit a decision to what we desired or thought in the moment; emotions may have led us astray. But capturing in action, at least provides a record at the time.
We cannot capture every decision and moment; neither on paper or online. We cannot journal or dissect each moment, nor every triviality that occurs. Stopping and capturing in the moment may not be possible. But the decisions that we do and how we spend our time, need to be captured sooner, so our thinking and judgement can be committed to paper.
I hear a lot about focus; and yes, I believe this is important. But we are real, complicated people with multiple demands on our lives. If we ignore our friends forever, we shall have no friends. If we ignore work, what does out employment prospects look like? What about family? This does not mean that focus and goals are unimportant, to be forgotten about. I am contending this just means there is a need to balance the needs and demands on our lives; we cannot entertain being a one-dimensional human being.
So, what does this mean. I believe this really means getting a handle on out lives; what did we choose; why did we choose it; how are we spending out time? Without any records of these, how will we know; how will we measure and how will be improve?
Some personal examples
An example of this was choosing a university course. Writing down the reasoning for making the choice significantly helped. So, asking what criteria do I have for choosing? What are the most important? The choice was based on my strengths — what could I do well in and, enjoy? Where is my interest? Employment prospects were considered, but knowing myself I realised if these two points were not met than I will do poorly; defeating the point of choosing for employment. I could then try and maximise the opportunities after graduation, seeing what choices are available at the time.
Choosing an institution close to home was based on knowing stability and familiarity in my personal life is an important characteristic for doing well. Moving out of the comfort zone one direction at a time, allows me to focus on one aspect; to much change could lead to paralysis.
Writing it down identified the self-knowledge that had not become explicit — specifically motivations and limitations. Also, the limits of my knowledge and foresight became clearer; I did not know enough to make a future decision at that point, and it would be better to make it later. This could be managed one step at a time. The process showed by working through the analysis, the questions that should be asked; the biases that became apparent; and the reasons for choice.
Reviewing this later, identified the right and wrong aspects of these choices. Enjoyment led to discipline, which led to success. Stability helped, but more personal growth would be made moving away. But this was a trade-off and part of the choice; choice closes other avenues. And, this is a crucial point; I do not believe there are perfect choices, and there will always be some amount of trade-off.
Additionally, avenues closed are the opportunity costs. But these are often not measurable. The road not taken is the road not taken. Where it leads is a guess; irreversible maybe, but unclear what may have been. To be discarded. It cannot be changed. So, there is little that can be done in comparing the outcome of a decision to the imagined outcome of another, only in understanding the decision-making process.
One that did not work out was a job decision. From a few offers my preference was one that did not involve travel and was close to home. It did not work out. From discussions I thought they were something they were not; and I believed a conversation without challenging the source. I realised the basis of the choice lay with certain goals was correct; my approach to assessing and validating sources was not; trusting without verifying was a major fault.
On reviewing the decision, I believe that writing it down significantly aided the understanding and sensemaking; I would have struggled to see the bigger picture without it and could not unpick the mistakes. It could be defensiveness and a lack of openness; but it could have been not having the information, or an accurate picture of the information.
A final example was identifying where I spent my time — it was surprising; it certainly was not towards my aims. Consciously I was trying to build the momentum towards a personal vision but it was clear that I was not making progress, or so I thought. Was my thinking distorted; did the goals mislead? What were the goals? Were they any good? What was I attempting to achieve? Subconsciously was I sabotaging myself? Was it self-deception? Was it a lack of confidence and escapism?
It should be noted that not all goals are good. There are many bad goals. They lead in the wrong direction are impossible; unclear or too incongruent or inconsistent. Considering, the lack of perfect situations and decisions; the potential tensions between goals and motivations, there is a need for clarity; a need for process; a need for clear direction. What direction are these goals taking me in, is this a direction that I want to go?
Just measuring; writing down when and what I did showed quickly where time was being spent. The aim was to spend time on action; learning and doing specific skills, and uncovering the best direction to take, given my aims. But no, time was spent on easy and time-consuming busy work; time spent on irrelevant goals; time spent looking for more information where it was not necessary. It was time spent hiding; time spent running away from what I needed to do.
Fear of change, fear of progress and quite possibly fear of success was dominating and eating my time. I was afraid; fear lying in my subconscious, making decisions for me I neither knew or understood. Only the process of writing and reviewing gave feedback; to understand; to make changes.
The first thing was the goals. Irrelevant goals that did not match my long-term objectives. How could this be possible? Well did I write down the reason for choosing my goals? Did I check that they were SMART? What about reviewing their relevance — are they still relevant? They were neither relevant in the first place or now.
Goals were chosen after the aims were decided. Where was the aims when the goals were decided? In my head — not being referred to. The reasons for choosing them — in my head and they sounded good at the time without much thought. Which are the most important? No decision was made. Process was lacking; thinking was lacking; decisions were lacking. Hence, the value of writing things down.
Although we cannot control what happens in life, we can control our decisions; we can ensure that they are congruent with our aims. Thus, we can set ourselves up better for success, writing the goals out clearly and putting reasons for choosing them. Reviewing our bigger picture aims; ensuring these are in alignment. This needs not be War and Peace; it can be a few paragraphs or one page of paper. It could be using a college notepad and writing down a goal on one page; just justifying for yourself.
But because of the number of goals that I had, not all could be achieved. It helps to write down the priority. It also helped to write-out how I was going to achieve my goals, with so many how do you focus or dedicate the appropriate amount of time; or do you burn yourself out with over-ambition and still fail because these were unachievable in the first place. Just noting these points writing them down and reviewing them; feeding back in action, helps improve performance. It also helps to ensure that the most important things get done.
Some further thoughts
As mentioned, writing things down does not have to be taxing. Practically this can be done on computer or by hand. Personally, writing this out in a notebook by hand has involved a greater amount of thought and reflection; the process of translating to pen and paper has a greater engagement than the keyboard. It can always be typed up afterwards. A college lined book or a ring binder and a legal pad are easy and cheap to get hold of.
It is important to review your goals and decisions, but at appropriate intervals. This depends on the importance and immediacy of the goals or decisions. So, at the start of the year it is worth having the long-term aim available to refer to. Write out the main goals and the subgoals from them, being specific. Now write why these are the right goals and are likely to get results. If you can, write down any assumptions these may be based on, such has had a certain income or time available, a certain living situation or employer. These are important to measure against the outcomes, the assumptions may be false. This should also be done for any major decision.
The process of writing reasons down and referring to them allows biases to be seen. They are clear on paper. You can see the thought process in the decision-making. You can see how these fit with many of the mental models and critical thinking. So, having a good critical thinking book, mental models book and biases book handy is useful for the review. Looking through the different headings in each of these books you can start to see these different items, you can start to build a personal checklist in future.
This need not be a long and laborious process; the different methods will become engrained over time. Just do a quick review, and then look at them in future when the outcomes become clearer. Remember this is not a stick to beat yourself with, but a guide. It guides you from where you were to where you want to be. Review allows progress to be see; it allows the thought process revised and corrected. It allows for the unforeseen to be identified; its effect; why the planning and decisions may not have transpired; the thinking may not have been faulty, just life happened.
As for frequency, it depends on the goal or decision, but quarterly or yearly give enough time for you to see the outcomes and not be too demanding or distracting on your time. It does not need to be a major review, over the course of a couple of hours, and having some follow-on plans is suitable. Learning from these and having plans to go forward with is necessary, otherwise the learning will go to waste.
So, writing articles can be useful part of the process. It can be a measure of your thinking. It can help in getting more experience in the process. For me, I found the benefits of writing articles for this process, and a few related articles I wrote that may be useful to you, are given below:
https://medium.com/motivate-the-mind/my-experience-of-making-changes-19765f4c07c
https://medium.com/motivate-the-mind/just-get-it-done-e6928d0f0010
https://medium.com/motivate-the-mind/my-battle-with-clich%C3%A9s-e6fccbb71193
https://medium.com/@ab49977/questions-but-what-do-they-mean-88ee07165ed8
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have found writing down the reasons for decisions and goals very useful. Having something to refer to over time, was useful for measuring the alignment with my aims but also to understand the justification. Having these written down allowed them to be referred to after the fact; it allows the thinking to be uncovered; the subconscious can become the conscious. It provides a measure for progress and a way of improve your approach, if you give it time.
I hope you found this helpful; and any feedback is gratefully appreciated.
