How do you write so much

How do you write so much - the intensity of this question has exponentially increased after coming back to corporate. Probably most folks can relate to the crazy schedule a lot more now than my entrepreneurial days.

Here is the secret. Steal it if you like it.

I don’t segregate work and life into buckets. To me everything is life. Things like work, children, marriage, entertainment, gardening etc happens inside life.

At a meta level, we use the same mind and body to go through all things in life. The systems designer in me optimizes the intricacies of systems in our body to handle all things in life. One of the systems we use extensively is our nervous system. our brain is a big part of it.

Information processing is key to how our brain perceives the world around and inside.

The information is input by the sensory system and the processing happens in the brain. Our brains are awesome at internalizing the input from the sensory organs but it cannot internalize a thought. It is strange but that is how it is.

To internalize a thought, we must externalize it first. Either as a spoken word or a written word or an image etc. in shorts, via externalization our brain internalizes. This is why information, knowledge and understanding are not the same.

Understanding takes more effort. Externalization helps in the process.

When you put down the written word or a visual or a voice, externalization happens. I prefer written words over spoken words. It is easy because our visual processing is far enhanced than our auditory processing system.

Also it takes much lesser time to put down. This is why visual note taking is hard as it takes a lot of processing power just to put down. A written language is so much easier. You can revisit anytime. It is like a Time Machine.

I learnt the intricacies of our memory for a semester in my cognitive science masters and I empathise how lousy our memory is. So I don’t trust it for anything. Written word became my go to tool for digestion and expression. When you live like that, you wouldn’t care how many words you wrote.

If people knew how the brain struggles with information processing, all my written words would not seem so wonderful at all. - that is my take on information processing similar to how Michelangelo puts it about mastery.

Externalization is key for processing information and understanding. When you don’t write or draw or speak, you end up constipated in your head. Brain fog will be natural. I wonder why they don’t teach all this in schools 🫣