There's a version of note-taking that feels productive without actually being useful. You accumulate ideas in a private system — carefully tagged, neatly organised — and they go nowhere. The act of capture becomes a substitute for the act of thinking.
Public writing breaks this loop.
The forcing function
When you write for yourself, you can paper over gaps in your reasoning. You know roughly what you mean, so you don't have to say it precisely. When you write for a reader, those gaps become visible. You have to close them, or acknowledge that you don't actually understand the thing you thought you did.
Paul Graham called this thinking on paper. The key insight is that writing isn't a way to communicate ideas you've already had — it's a way to have the ideas in the first place.
"The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into a problem, I'm more likely to take the easy way out, which is to not think about it."
The public commitment changes the incentive structure. You can't take the easy way out.
Consistency over perfection
The trap with public writing is treating every post as a finished artifact. It isn't. A post is a snapshot of how you think about something right now. It will probably be wrong in some ways. It will definitely be incomplete.
The cure for this is volume. When you publish frequently, no single post carries too much weight. You can be wrong publicly, update your thinking, and write about that too. The archive becomes a record of thought-in-progress, which is more honest and more interesting than a polished corpus of final takes.
A rough framework I've found useful:
- Write the confused version first. Don't try to have the idea fully formed before you start. Write out what you're uncertain about. The structure usually emerges.
- Publish at 80%. The last 20% is usually just anxiety dressed up as editorial standards.
- Let the comments be the edits. Feedback from readers is often more clarifying than another round of self-editing.
What to write about
The easiest answer: write about what you're doing anyway.
If you're building something, write about the decisions you're making and why. If you're learning something, write about what surprised you. If you're stuck on a problem, write about the problem — you'll often solve it in the process.
The most useful posts I've read are ones where someone shares genuine uncertainty. Not "here's the answer" but "here's how I'm thinking about this, and here's where I'm not sure yet." That kind of writing is rarer and more valuable than confident hot takes.
The practical side
This site is my attempt to do this in public. The posts here won't all be polished essays. Some will be short. Some will be half-formed. That's intentional.
The goal isn't to build a body of definitive writing. It's to write enough that thinking-via-writing becomes a habit — and to leave a record of what I was curious about, and how those curiosities evolved over time.
That seems worth doing.