Noticing & Writing

I started writing this newsletter with the idea that “once a week I set myself a timer for 60min and what I write in that time gets published”. Sit down, write what’s in my head, spill the registers.

It’s now been a year since the first post and while the idea at its core — don’t overthink it, write about what’s on my mind, keep a deadline, bias to publish — is still the same, the way I go about it has changed.

After a few weeks I started to get anxious about possibly coming up empty when I would sit down on a Sunday morning to write. As a remedy to that I started to keep a note on my phone with ideas for posts. Nothing fancy, really: a single note in Apple Notes with that grandiose title “Newsletter”, that contains ideas in the form of possible titles, half-sentences, screenshots, fully-fleshed out paragraphs.

Keeping this note had effects not only on how I kept track of ideas and used them, but also on the ideas themselves.

As expected, I no longer had an empty page defiantly grinning at me on Sunday mornings. I could open my note, scroll up and down, and pick an idea that spoke to me that morning. Sometimes I’d get a new idea while reading through the collected ones and wrote about that instead. Sweet, the note worked.

Less expected: with the note always available to keep track of what I found interesting, I found more interesting things. Instead of only thinking about this newsletter when sitting down to write it, it now was always on my mind, since everything could potentially be a good idea to keep track of.

I started to notice more: how someone went about fixing a particularly nasty bug stood out more, conversations with friends stayed with me longer because I plucked two sentences from them and turned them over in my note, a moment in a TV show that reminded me of programming turned into multiple moments of reflection, I also realized that setting up a new computer is quite the ceremony for me.

Turns out, when you walk through life constantly wondering whether something would make for a good story, you’ll end up finding good stories. Someone told me that’s what makes gratitude journals work: by taking time each day to write down what you’re thankful for, you become more mindful of what’s good in your life.

After a year and 51 of these posts, instead of throwing stats at you and or a bulleted list of all the things I learned, here’s my most cherished realization: there’s a lot of wonder that only appears upon second glance, so keep your eyes open and try to notice.