My Number 1 Strategy to Think Clearly
Do you know the feeling of having 1,000 problems, ideas etc. in your head at the same time? I often feel like that.
Sorting through all the thoughts is a big challenge and I quickly fall into a thought loop - the same thoughts keep coming back without me making any real progress.
But, thank God, I have found the perfect antidote: writing.
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| Image created in cooperation with DALL·E 3 |
Writing helps me to sort my thoughts. Just the task of putting something into written words makes some problems disappear. In my mind, a problem often feels more serious than it actually is.
It’s similar with ideas.
As long as they are in my head, ideas are not very concrete and the solutions are unclear. However, if I write down ideas and reflect on what I’ve written, possible solutions sometimes come naturally.
Writing is a supercharger for creativity, as it forces you to act and really good ideas only come while you act.
How does writing help you think more clearly?
What does writing mean?
I recently read an article about what writing actually means: Writing is difficult for many people, but many people think that the aim of writing is to compose a text. But this is not the case, writing is basically quite simple.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. - Neil Gaiman
The hard part
Putting down words is easy.
The real challenge in crafting a text lies in the editing process. I mean if you wrote down the key ideas even editing is not that hard, but it can be time-consuming to create a meaningful text out of the words jotted down.
You need to change words to emphasize what you want to say. You have to rearrange some paragraphs to increase understanding and oftentimes you need to delete redundant content.
Nevertheless, writing as a tool for thinking more clearly does not mean a heavy load of editing.
Separate writing and editing
Many people who write regularly are probably familiar with this feeling: The first few sentences are difficult. It takes a few sentences/minutes to get into writing mode. But once you’ve reached it, the sentences literally flow out of you and a page is written in no time at all.
Once you’ve reached that mode, you shouldn’t allow yourself to be interrupted.
Not even by yourself.
However, if you try to edit while writing, this is exactly what happens. If you start thinking about the exact wording or how you could have formulated the previous paragraph differently, you interrupt your writing mode and you might lose interesting thoughts. Editing is a different task. Right now you are writing.
It’s also completely fine if the wording is a little bumpy in literary terms, as long as you write down what you have to say. You can paraphrase later.
Don’t interrupt yourself by trying to find the optimal vocabulary.
Editing is important (also for helping you think clearly)
Editing written thoughts is also very important: it allows you to reflect on your thoughts.
It is similar to what you would do in your head, but with the advantage of having additional working memory: the written text.
This enables you to delve into more complex subjects and uncover fresh ideas lurking between the lines, ones you hadn’t considered before.
Apply writing for thinking clearly
Now let’s get a bit more actionable: How does writing help you think more clearly? Remember these three things:
- Just start jotting down your thoughts. Don’t think too much about it.
- Don’t think about editing while you still have thoughts to write down.
- After you’ve cleared your mind, go back to what you’ve written and make sure it reflects your current thoughts.
Next I want to share three situations where writing can clarify your thinking.
3 Situations Where Writing Clarifies your Thinking
I frequently encounter the following situations. Whenever I do, I use writing as a tool to think more clearly.
- Feeling stressed or being overwhelmed
- Generate new ideas or improve existing ones
- Overcome negative thoughts
1. Stress or being overwhelmed
This was the situation in which I discovered writing as a tool for mental clarity.
In my role as Head of IT & Digitalization, there are always weeks in which events come thick and fast: several projects make a big leap at the same time, there are disruptions to be resolved and, incidentally, a budget has to be drawn up and a training concept developed.
The sheer number of topics makes it impossible to manage them all in my head alone. Writing good notes and linking them is a good way to get an overview. I currently use a system that combines content from the Zettelkasten, PARA and the GTD method.
By “writing to think more clearly”, however, I don’t mean writing notes. I mean writing as an outlet to deal with stress and the feeling of being overwhelmed.
In stressful weeks like this, when everything needs to be done at once, I like to take half an hour in between and write down all the thoughts that are currently on my mind. It can be a wild jumble of topics and I jump from one topic to the next. I’m sure nobody can understand or comprehend the resulting text, but that’s not the point.
It’s about getting the thoughts down on paper.
For yourself.
After all the thoughts have been unloaded, I like to read through what I’ve written briefly and make one or two small adjustments - not to make the text easier to read, but to adapt its content to my current thoughts and feelings.
After this exercise, I usually feel much less stressed. Because, as said in the beginning, some problems just disappear once you write them down.
2. Idea generation
I’ve figured out that writing can be a great creativity technique for sparking and growing ideas as well. It’s handy for digging up fresh ideas and making them even more awesome!
But how do you start? Your creative spark is a note of an idea that you recorded at some point. I use a two-stage process to take my ideas to the next level through writing:
- In the first step, I write down the idea briefly and start off with a few sentences that immediately come to my mind. Even if the first sentences are probably useless, they are a good way to get into writing mode. Once there, the idea develops almost automatically. While writing you have to simultaneous think (about the idea, how to find the right words) and write (the physical process of jotting down words). This leads to an increase in brain activity: different neural networks begin to fire across your brain, which increases your creativity. More and more often, I notice references (to other ideas, articles or books I read, …) surfacing in my mind as I write. In order to “store” this references, I incorporate them in the text (I will fill in a link later on). I continue write until I exhaust all the thoughts that correspond to the original idea.
- Step two is to read through what I’ve written. The first written text is usually long and many parts (especially the beginning) are unusable. In order to distill the noteworthy elements, I go through the entire text once. References are transformed into links, and the intriguing segments are condensed, ideally into a format suitable for future implementation. I often utilize bullet points for this purpose, as they are short and can be reviewed more easily in the future compared to the whole text.
When working solo on my ideas, to me writing is the most dynamic tool to bring my ideas forward.
3. Negative thoughts
In the mind everything seems more grim than it actually is. If you think about daunting tasks, for example, just getting started is the part which is most cumbersome. Once started, the next steps are much easier.
Therefore, a third situation where I use writing to support my thinking, is whenever I experience negative thoughts. Negative thoughts are prone to initiate thought-loops which become more negative in each iteration. It’s like a downward spiral.
I start by writing down how I currently feel. Then I explore my current thoughts and try to write everything down that comes to my mind. Oftentimes, these are possible explanations for my current mood.
The key element here is, again, to just start writing. As explained in the previous section, the first few sentences might be bumpy. This doesn’t matter; they are just there to help you starting up the writing mode. Once boot d up, you will unearth possible explanations for your negative thoughts.
Just the task of putting something into written words makes some problems disappear.
To me, when feeling negative, or depressed, emptying my mind over a sheet of paper is one of the best mood boosters I can imagine.
I hope you’ve found my article interesting! I’d be happy if you share your thoughts with me at Medium or LinkedIn!
Cheers, Matthias