Thinking in writing

Start writing down thoughts to strengthen your thinking. I heard this advice many times, but only this year I decided to try it myself. The results were so impressive that I decided to describe the experience and share my theoretical reasoning.



What did I get after six months of using the thinking in writing?

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3. After the introduction of the method of solving problems by writing at work, the junior employee became more independent, since he better understands the goals of the task, most of the questions disappear at the level of wording in the text. The lead can follow a chain of reasoning, which allows you to influence not the result, but the thought process itself.
4. I began to write more often to the corporate knowledge management system, it became clearer how to organize material there.

What is wrong with our ordinary thinking that we have to write out reasoning?



According to Miller's law, we can keep no more than 7 elements in our head. Usually the tasks are more complicated, and in the systems under study there are much more 7 elements. If we sort out various options, then dynamically created elements are compared in the brain, then we will constantly run into this limit.



I often noticed in my home that when thinking about various solutions, the brain quickly begins to choke on the number of these solutions, and I begin to return to the solutions that I thought a few minutes ago. Fatigue quickly sets in after a few of these thought cycles. After rest, you manage to move forward a little more, and again you get tired. I don't want to think over the same thoughts several times and not waste so many mental resources.



When we need to remember something, the brain constantly has to come back to it. Imagine that we were sent to the store to buy: milk, bread, salt and fruit. On the way to the store, we constantly need to play this list in our head so as not to forget anything: milk, bread, salt and fruit. Maxim Dorofeev in his book Jedi techniqueswrote that every thought that revolves in our head devours the resources of the body (thought fuel). If we can cultivate habits that allow us not to memorize, but to write down tasks, then we can live not only more efficiently, but also more relaxed.



Our brain is so wired that it tries to see the meaning and history in what it sees. It often works, but sometimes we fall prey to the pulling of reality onto an idea. Psychologists have conducted many experiments on false memories, in which they showed that it is enough for the brain to be given bits of information, according to which it can re-invent a story.



Elizabeth Loftussent the subjects booklets of 4 stories, recorded by their relatives. Among these 4 stories, one story was fictional. When the subjects were asked to describe the details of the events, a quarter of them were able to tell the details about the fictional story.



This means that the sense of the adequacy and rationality of our thoughts is unreliable.



How to make

1. bypass the problem of limiting 7 plus or minus 2,
2. do not waste resources on keeping ideas in your head,
3. to prevent the brain from fooling us?

It turns out that there is a universal simple solution, which consists in the fact that you need to use external sources of fixing thoughts.



Let's look at this idea using the example of chess (example taken from the Education for the Educated 2020 course ). Experienced chess players know how to play chess mentally, that is, without using physical pieces and a field. This is called playing blind. But

1. only experienced chess players can play this way,
2. and when playing two chess players of equal strength, when one plays blindly and the other sees the position on the board, the other easily wins.

Why is it harder to play blind? The second chess player does not need to waste thought-fuel in order to keep the position in his head. Instead, he looks at the pieces, on the field, and quickly switches his attention between different combinations. This is the concept of the exocortex - to take everything outside the brain that makes it easier to solve problems.



If for playing chess , figures and a field serve as an exocortex , then for other processes text, pseudocode or program code, visual modeling languages, graphs, pictures can be used - it all depends on the process that you want to remove from the brain.



Thinking in writing is the most versatile way to get thoughts out of your head. In most cases, this is the most effective method. Writing linked text is more difficult than drawing a few squares and connecting them with lines or writing out ideas in bullets.



Three examples from different fields in which writing thinking has proven effective

Example 1. Improving psychological well-being

Once James Pennebaker found that when people talk about their grief to others, they recover more quickly. James wondered if it would have the same effect if people describe their grief in text. It turned out that this also works. It has subsequently been shown that it also works well to respond in writing to questions related to future plans.



In another experiment, students were asked to think about plans for several years ahead. One group was asked to visualize as if they were achieving their goals, and the second group was asked to write down the steps to implement their plans in writing. At the end of the year, the average score of the second group increased.



Written study of goals has a positive effect not only on the areas for which there are plans, that is, the effect is generalized between different areas of life.



In the Self Authoring project in the Future Authoring track, clients are invited to formulate several goals for 3-5 years ahead. Then, for each goal, they are asked to describe in writing life in 3-5 years, if this goal is fully achieved, as well as the opposite option, when this goal is not achieved at all. Thus, a vector is formed that is aimed at achieving the goal.



Now, every time a client consistently or accidentally approaches his goal, that is, moves along the formulated vector, the brain will produce dopamine, in other words, rejoice. It is important that such a vector is not formed in the head, if this exercise is carried out in the mind, you just need to write out ideas in the text!



One of the authors of the Jordan Peterson project claims that just having such vectors in people's heads makes them happy.

Example 2. Scalable management

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that the main reason for a successful organization is scalable management. The scalability of management at Amazon is ensured by the fact that managers are required to write a 6-page document for every important decision that needs to be made. You can't just call colleagues, show a presentation and make a decision. Presentations are prohibited in Amazon.



Instead, the author of the document prints out the document at the very beginning of the meeting and distributes it to all participants. For the first 15 minutes, everyone reads the document in silence, makes notes in the margins, emphasizes incomprehensible places. Then for 20 minutes the presenter goes over each paragraph with a pen in hand and asks for comments from the audience, making sure that everyone understands the document in the same way. Then there is a discussion and decision making for 20 minutes. In the last 5 minutes of the meeting, decisions are recorded. The document can be shortened to 2 pages, if the question is simple, then all minutes should be divided by 3. If the document is more than 6 pages, then it is considered that the issue is too complicated, so it should be split into several parts and solved in several meetings.



How does such a document scale management? Andy Grove, former Intel CEO and author of High Output Management, believes that the value of such documents is not in reading, but in writing. It is better for a manager to spend more time writing and thinking about a document than then the performers will solve problems that have arisen due to ill-considered moments.



There is a set of rules that a document must obey. These rules make up the scalability of the right mindset.

• The document must have a purpose. Everything that is not related to the current goal should be placed in separate documents.
• In the document, the manager must show what he thinks about the client and about the client. Amazon product managers have a working backwards technique , when they first write a press release describing a supposedly already created product with quotes from customers about how the product helps them in life.
• The document should cover the big picture of the organization.
• It is forbidden to be emotional in the document. It is recommended to specify the exact number instead of “most users”, for example “55.7% of users“.
• There must be at least two different decisions analyzed in the document. More is better.

There is etiquette in meetings. Here are some rules from there:

• Be ready to change your point of view at the meeting.
• If you have not had time to prepare the text for the meeting, it is better to postpone the meeting and take time to prepare than to have a bad meeting.
• If your boss disagrees, but you lack data, ask for the next meeting where you can prepare better.

This meeting format has the following advantages:

• Convenient for readers, challenging for writers, making decision-making more thoughtful and less ineffective meetings.
• The meeting turns into a conversation, not a monologue of the speaker.
• If introverts usually suffer in meetings, then here they can focus on the problem, rather than an effective report. Now it's harder to crush colleagues with confidence.
• After the meeting, a document remains, which later serves as material for making a decision.
• This document can be used to analyze the author's thinking principles.

Such a document and method of conducting meetings did not immediately appear in Amazon. For example, at the beginning, the document was handed out to managers before the meeting, so that they came to meetings prepared, but over time, Bezos noticed that even the coolest top managers come unread the document, and they started the discussion simply by running through the text 5 minutes before the meeting. Then it was decided not to fight this behavior, but to allocate the first part of the meeting for familiarization.



This document impressed me so much that I decided to make a similar document at the company I work for.

Example 3. Solving research problems of the RnD department

While working as the head of the RnD department at Flocktory ^{[link removed by moderator]} I noticed several problems that I thought could be solved with the help of thinking in writing.

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In July, we introduced thinking by writing to solving complex problems. In fact, this is just a template, consisting of three chapters that you need to fill out while solving a problem.



1. We start by writing out the objectives of the task in our own words, how the decision should affect the key metrics of the company. This chapter forces the contractor to look at their task through the eyes of a business.



2. Then follows the main chapter, where the performer writes down his thoughts and immediately tests the hypotheses. The text in this section should contain phrases hinting at the work of thinking: it follows, but it follows, a hypothesis, verification, refutes, confirms, etc. This chapter is the magic of thinking by writing.



3. After completing the task, the contractor is asked to write

• all results in a separate list,
• think about what can be changed in the organization so that such tasks do not arise or are solved faster,
• (my favorite section) what the performer learned during the task.

To make the document easier to read by other people or by the performer himself after a long period of time (in fact, also another person), the second section is located at the very end of the document.



This solution format is far from suitable for every task, only 30% of the work time is spent on solving problems in this way. The main reason is that writing the text takes a long time. When you don't need to solve a problem by writing:

• the task is simple
• the algorithm for solving the problem is known
• you need to write a program according to a clear TK (when programming, thinking with a code is automatically turned on), thinking in writing is more likely necessary to write a TK.
• the problem can be solved by a quick call.

How to start practicing writing thinking?

The next time you run into a difficult problem, start writing down the line of reasoning in the text. This is not so easy because it is very unpleasant to realize that an idea that seemed so understandable in the text turns out to be unrelated and indistinct theses, and a desire immediately arises to throw it all away. For me, at first, writing down my thoughts caused physical discomfort, a desire to "get busy", not to waste time on nonsense. But gradually this feeling disappeared, and the recording became a habit.



Another way to practice writing thinking is by blogging, which allows you to make sense of the ideas you've gathered on a topic of interest to you. To test the method, I started a blog on telegram about thinking a week ago... The second goal of the blog is to gather a community of people who are interested in working to improve their thinking.

Conclusion

Thinking in writing makes the writer think over thoughts better, vague areas of reasoning become noticeable in the text. This text can then serve as a corporate discussion document, a temporary place to store chains of reasoning, and a way to see how the performer thinks. The brain trusts the written more than the thoughtful, therefore thinking in writing has psychotherapeutic properties.



In this article, we looked at the impact of writing text on thinking in the process. But we have not considered another obvious function of the text - information storage. Niklas Lumann created a method of writing books and articles known as Zettelkasten, thanks to which he wrote 58 books, over 100 articles. This technique reverses the writing process. If the classical way of writing books resembles a waterfall model of development: goal, plans, implementation, then Luman wrote small notes at the moments when a thought came to him. When there were enough notes on one topic, these notes were combined into books - like a flexible way of development. By the way, this article was written this way!



In the age of information technology and automation, working on your thinking gives a person a competitive advantage. I think that interest in this topic will only grow. Thinking in writing is an effective and affordable tool that you can start using right away after reading this article.