The importance of writing in the age of AI
Saint Jerome Writing by Caravaggio, which I had the good fortune to see some years ago. The brushwork on the red fabric looks surprisingly crude close-up
The writer Zvi Mowshowitz is a prolific blogger. He says that if you are thinking/reading/watching you should writing. How do I know this? Because I took notes when I watched this interview with him some time ago, and I’m referring to those notes now. Zvi makes the notes all the time, and that he makes those notes public. I regularly read the notes he makes during his AI research, which he publishes on his blog. It’s a useful way to find out about interesting articles, and people’s opinions on those articles.
I have been writing more and more frequently over the last three or four years. It really started, I think, we a new client contract I had, where I was working remotely and not in the same time-zone as the client. I was doing analysis for the client, and I realized that there was a problem with some of the work I was doing. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I spent a day looking into whether a particular action by the client would be beneficial to them, and concluded that it wouldn’t be beneficial. At the end of the day I might send the client a note telling them I had investigated X but I had concluded it wasn’t worth their doing it. The problem was that the client didn’t see all the work I had done, they just got the conclusion. So I decided to start keeping detailed notes on everything I was doing. And I saw it was extremely beneficial to have such a record, so I started to do it with my personal work too. I wrote about it over two years ago, so I can see exactly what I was thinking about it then. Here’s the article I wrote May 2023:
How I finally got the habit of productive note taking
It’s quite a good little article I think, and ends with an important point:
I make notes to help future me take action.
Why writing is even more important now
It really works. But more recently I’ve discovered there is another big advantage with keeping notes like this, and surprisingly it because of AI. I now have three years of detailed notes on my interests and things that I’ve done that I can process with AI, to, for example:
- Come up with ideas for short articles or videos I could create to promote myself on LinkedIn.
- Get a detailed overview of what it is that I actually do, so that I can improve my business website.
- Get ideas about how I can more efficiently spend my time and define goals.
Some people think that AI might stop us from needing to do things like writing but I think it’s actually the opposite — you’ll get a lot more benefit from AI if you write a lot.
So, my message is — Write! All the time!
Writing every day in June
I’m managing to stick to my goal of writing a post for this website every day, which I wrote about here:
June will be a month of posting every day
I’m glad I did it, I am finding it easier and easier to write the more I do it.