Information Overload

A major challenge in our always-on world is maintaining clarity of thought; information is abundant and is coming towards us faster than we can process. It’s hard to digest even a small fraction of the news, research and blogs out there - let alone do anything useful with it.

A Solution

There are many ways of distilling information on a subject into the key ideas. With some nudges from a friend, I’ve found that writing helps more than anything else:

  1. Writing forces us to structure information into coherent ideas.

  2. Once ideas are on paper, we (and others) can see where the gaps are, criticise them, and ultimately, develop them.

Paul Graham summarises this in Writing, Briefly:

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

I’ve experienced the benefits putting pen to paper in a slightly different way. After many years in consulting I now understand that the primary objective of producing slides is to clarify thinking, and the secondary objective is to communicate those thoughts. Initially, I thought it was the other way around.

As with everything else, good writing takes some practice. I’ve decided to start a blog to give me an excuse to write more, and to develop my ideas and pursue my interests. I also hope this acts as a channel for feedback - on the writing, but more importantly, on the ideas.

Thanks for reading. I’d be keen to hear more if you have any thoughts or good resources on ‘writing to learn’.