I Like to Write Things Down

I consider myself a bit forgetful. I’m not going to tell the reasons for that, but I think I know some reasons 🤔 anyways, now, I don’t know if I can solve the problem and remember more things. And even if I do, it will take time and till then, I need some mechanism to help me remember things. So, what do I do? Other than my brain, what can store lots of information and not forget it very easily? A computer. My laptop, my smart phone, the cloud, my account in cloud. So, I realized I can write things down. Someone once told me to note important things down in case I forget. I don’t how, but I somehow followed it at som point. It all started when I thought I could write down all things I read, learn and do, in terms of my career mostly. So that’s what I did, I called it my learning log and created a GitHub repository for it and started doing it daily. It took time. It was a bit tedious. I don’t do it at all now. 😅🙈 Anyways, I think I’ll do it again. For now, what I do is - still write things down - at least my tasks, some of my thoughts for the tasks, if not all the things that I’m doing. So whenever I went to work, I kind of wrote some of my daily tasks or tasks for a particular thing in a file and ticked things off of it. I would note down even micro tasks in it, so it would be quite long and I would also write down some thoughts and decisions. I do pair programming, and usually I write when I talk. It might look weird. But I do it. Or I can talk and then write down, where I might talk faster but it will be weird to write that all down after talking 😅🤔 I don’t know. But that’s what I do currently. And then when I take breaks, it’s so easy to come back and see where I left off. Like, what thoughts I had without being like “okay, so what were we doing?” and may be forget a thing or two. At least, it helps me. Recently, I put off a task for weeks. But I had noted down my research on it - thoughts, questions, where code was present for some stuff. I could easily get back to it! It was pretty awesome. I just had to read through what I had noted down. I probably didn’t write down everything. But it helped a lot :)

Also, some more pros that I see to this are - my gyan is now in written form. Stored somewhere - blog or repo or my notes app. It’s scattered yes. Tough to search may be. But still searchable. And if I want to go back and do something similar, I could it in a few minutes. Learn it again easily. And someone else can learn from it too. Also, I read somewhere recently about how only you know how far you have come and don’t let that be untold. So I’ll make sure I tell my stories, at least with respect to my career and may be my life too. I blog about my cycling 🚴, running 🏃 and cooking 🥪 experiences. :P Sometimes some other technical stuff too and about Open Source Software.

I also like to write a lot 😂even when I text, friends sometimes tell me I type too much :P Usually people get pissed off when they read lots of text and see that they have to read lots of text. Once I told a pissed off person that - information when compressed could lose information and gave an example of WhatsApp compressing images and how it loses some quality. He replied to me that people use WhatsApp because images download fast :P consuming is easy :P Anyways, may be if I really want many people to read - I could think about the audience and “please” them and empathize with them. Otherwise, if the content is just for me and is probably just some unsolicited gyan and I don’t want to emphasize it too much, which is usually true in my case - because convincing is too much work and I would do it only if I really feel the thing is important or let people do whatever they want :P and not influence or even try to influence them by giving my thoughts. So, meh, I will write whatever I want to most times :P Some day I can come back and read it for myself. And if others like it, awesome! Happy to give my gyan while storing it for myself too :P :)