My new habit is starting to form and shape itself. I started the new year with a few little habits I want to establish and my writing habit slowly kicks in. Originally I intended to take 30 minutes every day to write: my thoughts on this blog, comment on documents in the company and finish my own documents.
Until now I have mostly been the reading type of person. Back in school I’ve spent a significant amount of money on books about programming. This helped me to get into the field. Since I moved into management I noticed a similar kind of learning path: I again bought – and am still buying – books on management and leadership. This seems to be my learning habit and my way of getting into a specific topic.
However, writing means to learn to express myself better and with more clarity. Structuring my thoughts into well-crafted arguments allows me to think in more detail and from a more diverse set of perspectives. My most recent example is a blog post about migrating from a Monolith to Microservices. I’ve been trying to write this post for almost two months now. Several versions of it exist by now, but it seems the post is still to rough to actually make sense.
Additionally I discovered, that writing those lines has almost been like therapy for me. I recently announced that I would be leaving my current company and in doing so I wanted to write down what I would want to help my next gig with. Especially on this topic as I have seen a migration that went south (at least in my opinion). After I acknowledged my self-therapy I started to wonder what my real message is and re-wrote the whole post again. Mostly because during this process I discovered two things: 1/ I don’t really have anything new to add to the discussion and 2/ this topic is really complex and one post does not do credit to it. It’s still not finished and I’m still writing it from time to time.
But what does this story have to do with this post? It illustrates why at least for me the process of writing helps me to lay out my arguments much better. Before, most of those arguments were formed semi-spontaneously during a conversation on the water-cooler. In result those were a lot more rough not only on the edges. What I can slowly see happening is that my arguments become much more sound and I feel much safer when sharing them.
Additionally I realized that by writing my lines of thought and my arguments, they scale much better. While before I had to talk to many people, I now can point to some of the internal documents where I’ve articulated my thoughts. So I don’t have to start from scratch every time.