Externalizing Your Thoughts and Feelings Through Writing

It can lead to better memory, rationalization, and clarity

As a child I wrote a lot. Like most children I took notes in school all day. But when I got home, I rewrote all of my notes to drill the concepts into my memory. Looking back, I might have done this naturally—as a coping mechanism for my dyslexia. In addition to that, I also kept a journal. I wrote in it daily. I had piles of notebooks, for different purposes—all over my room, in my book bag, and archived in boxes. But until a few months ago, I didn't realize how much that practice was something I was missing as an adult.

For the last 5 years, I have been writing this newsletter. Prior to that I wrote for work and personal reasons, but none of that writing was for the purposes I stated above. I stopped rewriting things and journaling in high school. This was also when my memory and introspectiveness started to wane.

I started to really notice this, mid-2022, when I wrote about my exploration into cognition. So, as a systems person, I built solutions. I created numerous PKM (personal knowledge management) systems, until I built one in Obsidian. This one seemed to work best. While I did have a tool to augment my lack of memory, I was still not recalling the information without it. This brought me to the real solution, the simplest one of all.

In October of 2024, I started to really get back into writing by hand. This changed my approach to thinking. It brought me back to my childhood. Rather than having a dozen notebooks lying around, I have one, my reMarkable tablet.

Since getting my reMarkable Paper Pro, I have used it nearly every day. I start all ideating on it. I handwrite meeting notes on it. I even journal on it. This letter is not about my reMarkable or how I use it. If you do want to know more about that, reply to this email or comment below. The point of this letter is that I am thinking through writing—like I did as a child.

Thanks to computers, we don't have to manually take meeting notes, we don't have to rewrite things. But for me, this became detrimental. I need the act of writing to process information. I am not telling you to buy an e-ink tablet or dust off your notebooks for reinstatement. You can totally achieve this by typing. What I am advocating for is using writing as a medium to process information. To use it as a mechanism to slow you down and do things manually. To process the thoughts yourself, rather than offloading it on a computer.

This really hit when I was reading a complex article a few months back. While I could have read through it and simply copied quotes from the article to my PKM and moved on, I would not have retained that information. Instead, I read on my computer and hand wrote lines and concepts that I was reading in the article. As something stood out to me I rewrote it by hand, highlighted, and wrote marginalia. My brain started firing differently than simply adding it to my PKM.

I have leaned into this process 100%. I keep my reMarkable on my desk during the work week and in my kitchen on weekends. When I am reading something or just working through some thoughts I write them out. Most of what I write is a draft, basically scrap. If something comes out of it, I retype it into my PKM or whatever that output might be.

Most of you reading this might think this whole concept or belabored process is pointless. Just do it once, minimize the steps, offload it to AI. Almost every meeting I join, there is an AI meeting recorder. After those meetings, I get AI summaries sent to me. AI is summarizing articles, emails, and texts. When most people want to think, they volley it to a LLM. While I am an advocate for some AI, I do think it is already starting to ruin people's thinking process, like the computer did for some.

For me, my thinking process needs to be slow, manual, and intentional. I do this by writing, rewriting, and journaling most of my thoughts. The process has been enlightening. Now, rather than simply copy and pasting a thought or learning, I write it down to externalize it. When it is externalized, I can review it, commit it to memory, rationalize it—and gain clarity in the process.