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Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting topic or amalgamation point are weekly notes: summarize your week. Most of us on HN work with interesting problems and try to solve hard problems. Write about the stuff you learned in this week or what you worked on. It can be brief and it should e fun. Not homework.
Agree, I'm doing that to write about my indie hacking story, it's fun
1. You learn what you don't know about the topic or things you assumed you understood but really don't (a comment by @Swizec identifies the Illusion of explanatory depth; TIL)
2. You learn what things you thought you "knew" that are either contradictory or unfounded.
I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.
I did this for a few months in 2017 but it was taking like 90 minutes per chapter, and at full saturday morning 8am attention! It's like doing math homework. And math homework is not the most important thing I can spend the best 90 minutes of my day on.
Write "why"
(that is: aim express the intuition behind something, rather than gory details.)
Writing is like extending the context window for our brains neural nets. Writing helps us also defragment our brains. We write notes for ourselves to empty our brains of the thoughts at times. PG's work back in the day on writing as a form of think is still pretty relevant. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
Writing is like extending the context window for our brains neural nets. Writing helps us also defragment our brains. We write notes for ourselves to empty our brains of the thoughts at times. PG's work back in the day on writing as a form of think is still pretty relevant. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
If writing is a form of thinking, and a picture is worth a thousand words, does drawing (instead of writing) give a 1000x boost to thinking in any way?
Simple ideas sell, and finding them is a valuable skill.