223: Writing Stuff Down is a Super Power
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Let's talk about writing things down. I think writing stuff down has been both a superpower and sometimes a curse for me. So I want to talk about it. Welcome to Test & Code. This episode is brought to you by HelloPytest, the new fastest way to learn pytest, and by the PythonTest community. Find out more at courses.pythontest.com.

I like to write things down. I also like having the option to not write things down. Let's take an example of meetings. So when I go into a meeting, I like to take a notebook and a pen, and I open the notebook to a blank page. This blank page allows me and others to be ready for me to listen. So it indicates to myself a note to say, listen to other people, to let them talk.

I also think that it's a respectful thing to show that I am ready to take notes and take action items if somebody brings something up. Now, sometimes I have something I want to talk about in the meeting. So where do I put that? I usually put those in bullets on the next page. So the first page is blank. It's ready for me to listen. The next page will have a few bullets if I want to make sure that I don't forget those. Now, it's important for me to write those down on the next page

Because if I don't write those down...

I will think about things, think about the stuff I want to talk about and not really be listening to other people. So writing those down allow me to keep an open mind and open ears and listen before I get into that. Now, if I am the one holding the meeting, then it is, I think, a reverse. It's respectful to have a few bullets at the top to let people, it indicates to other people in the room that

that I have something I want to talk about. I still might ask questions or say, ask people how they're doing first, but it gives the appearance from other people that it's an agenda. That I have an agenda so that I'm not wasting people's time and I think it's respectful. How about digital stuff? So I use a notebook. What about digital? And this is just a personal thing for me. I know some people bring their notes or write notes on digital formats.

Digital tablets, I think, are a cool idea. I want to try. However, if it's a laptop or your phone that you're writing things down on, I actually just don't believe you. Even if I do believe you, my default feelings are you're doing something else. You're being bored with the meeting. You're bored with my discussion and you're looking up, I don't know, YouTube videos or looking up on your Mastodon feed or something.

Now, even if that's not true, there's just a part of me that thinks you're doing something else. Or maybe you're reading email, which is disrespectful during a meeting. So even if you're not, I think a paper and pen conversation

works better. You might have a tablet that's blank and that would work fine also, or like a digital tablet. Okay. So what do I write down? So if I'm in a, in a meeting, I have a tendency to want to write complete sentences, but that's not going to help. It's, I'm not going to be able to write the whole thing down and listen at the same time. So I'm trying to write keywords down to remind me of a topic, the topic we discussed. And I write

try to write enough keywords that I'll actually remember the whole thing. So sometimes they are whole sentences if that allows, but I try to just do shortened shorthand sentences. Also definitely to do items. And I'll even put a box around a box next to, to do item to remind me that I have agreed to do something. Also something I need to follow up on, even if it's like some other team member or somebody else in the meeting that's agreed to do something, but I'm going to have to follow up on it to make sure it's done or

or check later, I'll write that down to almost as a to-do. It is a to-do item for me to follow up on it later. Also, sometimes thoughts jump into my head, like meditation, when there's thoughts jumping in. During a discussion, there'll be other thoughts distracting me from listening to what we're talking about. Like maybe I'm terrible with pun jokes, so there might be a joke that pops into my head, and instead of like,

I'm like, I remember this joke, which I don't really have to. I'll write a little note down, just a couple words. And then even if I don't remember the joke, it'll tell my brain, you've written it down, you forgot about it, you won't forget about it. Or, you know, like one of the things that I noticed recently was the light on the back of my car, the light that shows the license plate.

like shines on the license plate, you're supposed to have that light and mine's burnt out. I need to, I need to get that fixed. Um, and so if that pops into my head during a meeting, I can't do anything about it in the meeting, but I'll just draw like, like write down light bulb or something. It's not like I'm going to forget about it, but writing it, writing something down allows me to trick my brain to stop thinking about it so I can focus on what's going on in front of me. Now, another thing I have a

too much stuff down. And if I come away from a meeting with an entire eight and a half by 11 page of notes, or maybe two pages, I'm really probably not going to read all of that. So to try to reduce that, I've gone to a shorter format, um,

notebook for instance just like a five I don't even know what this is five by seven or a little smaller and um and that's what I like to use to remind myself to be selective so it's the even though there's plenty of paper um it remote the shape reminds me to be selective for what I'm writing down so um why am I focusing on not writing stuff down well one one of the reasons is because

I kind of have had this problem of writing too much for a long time. So in college, I would write tons of notes through high school and through a couple years of college. I was writing so much down. I didn't always review it, but I felt like it was good to have that down. But at one point, my hand started hurting. So my right hand, I'm right-handed.

My right hand started hurting. My wrist was hurting my shoulder. It was just, I couldn't, I was writing so much that I couldn't write anymore. So I had to kind of quit cold Turkey. So, uh, I did get seen by a doctor, but, but until I did, um, I really just like had to stop. I had to stop doing so much. So I would go into for like a week. Actually, I don't remember how long it was. I would, um,

just not take notes. And this was, I panicked. How can I go to college without taking notes? But I would just try to be present, to try to just listen to what's going on in the lecture and not think about other stuff and really pay attention. Now that was a really good exercise in just trying to almost meditate on the lecture. And I think it was really good for me anyway. But I

After that, when I started going back to when my hand started feeling better, I could start taking notes again. I didn't want to get back into that problem. So I started being more selective about it. So more selective on what notes go down. So as soon as I hear something that I think I need to write down,

I try to take a fraction of a second to think, do I really need to know this later? The answer is no, don't write it down. Or I might really need to know this later, but does it just make sense to me and I'm probably going to remember it anyway? Well then either don't write anything down or write a shorter keyword because I can just get it out of my head, stop thinking about it, but I can, I can, um,

I know I'm going to remember it. Now, if it's something more complicated and I need to remember it, I will write more keywords or write a complete sentence. So being selective before it even hits the paper has helped me. Now there's the, the edit, that's just editing, like either writing it down or not, but there's the, what I wrote down, like, you know, did I write the right keywords? Did I write in complete sentences or whatever? That's,

That's another story. Don't edit. I don't do grammar editing or anything like that when I'm writing down. It's just to get it out of my head. Now, next, what do I do with the notes? So after I've got notes... Now, in college, it was pretty easy. The notes are there for studying, and once the test is done or the quarter's done or something, you just throw away the notebook. Didn't need it. I didn't keep any of that stuff. But...

But in work and life, it's different. So if I'm keeping a personal journal, that's a different story. That's great. But for like work or to-do items or this podcast or other stuff, what do I do with those notes? So as soon as I can, I'd like to go back to the notes and go through and make sure that there's squares by the to-do items or the things I need to follow up on.

And I usually circle those also to make sure to remember that that is important. So the circle kind of means I've already edited it. I've got the important things. Now the stuff that's not important, either I'll try to draw like a diagonal line through the stuff that I don't need to know about later, just as an indication that I've already edited this page of notes and I don't need it. And oftentimes I don't need to edit it.

don't need anything. And I just crossed the whole thing off. And I really love to do that. I love to do it so much that, um, so some of the to-do items might be just easy things like email so-and-so and ask a question. So just do that. I just go ahead and do that while I'm reviewing the notes. So then I can get rid of the whole thing. That's helpful. Now that's what I like to do. I'm not always great about it, but, um, at least once a week, I like to go through it

And then at least once a month, try to go through the whole notebook and make sure that I didn't miss anything. But a month is way too long. Every few days, make sure I didn't miss any pages of notes. It's good. Now, after I've got those circled or action items ready, I don't like to keep it on paper. So I like to transfer those. Even if I haven't got it done, I'm not going to... I don't want to keep a pile of notes to look up. So I'll transfer those to like...

GitHub or GitLab to-do items or tasks, get those out of there. Or for personal stuff, I'll put it in one of the to-do apps on my phone or email myself sometimes to remind myself with a time when I need to remember it or put something on a calendar or something like that. To get it out of note form and into actionable form helps. I also am a creative person, so I've got like

I often keep pages separate, separate pages at the beginning of my notebook with things like blog posts I'd like to write or podcast article episodes I'd like to record or research or software projects I'd like to do or different things like that or art projects. Those are fine and I don't really edit those too much, but I do like to keep a couple extra pages around those so that they can grow and then, um, uh,

I'll cross it off if I no longer want to do it or something like that or have done it. That's great. But I just keep way more lists of projects that I want to do then than I actually do. So what's the point of that? I mean, even if I never do those, there is a point. And the point is to get it out of my head so I don't have to keep thinking about it so that I can be present in what I'm working on. I want to talk a little bit about email because email is writing text.

with it's kind of for yourself but it's also for other people so um i i think i'm pretty good at emailing people um i i'm pretty short with my emails uh usually i'm probably lying about that i've written some long emails anyway so one of the things i want to remind people people of is email is not like texting and it's not like a journal where you can't in pen where you can't edit easily

Email, it's on your computer, so you can edit it. So that's what I want to remind people of, is get this stuff out of your head into an email and then edit it. Drafts are fine. You can store it as draft, especially if it's not like a nice email, if it's like talking about a problem. If it's urgent, get that out of there. Get it sent fast. But if it's not urgent, maybe sit on it a bit. So save it as a draft, come back later, review it.

And one of the, there's a couple of tips that I like with emails that I, that some people are just really bad at. And I used to be bad at the, the first one is if you're asking for somebody to do something, if there's an action that you want the person to do, have that action be in the subject line. So they can see when there's viewing their list of emails, you can see somebody's asking me to do something and this is what it is, or at least, you know, please respond or, uh,

Please take action on whatever. But having those actions in the subject helps the reader know that there's something you're asking them to do. The other thing is to have kind of one topic per email. So if you're asking somebody to call somebody for you or order something or anything, really, anything,

And you also were like, Hey, while I'm talking to you, like in a conversation, you would go up, maybe go up to somebody, ask somebody to do something. But you, since you're there, you may as well ask them about their dog or ask them about stuff, other stuff. I don't really do that in work emails. I like to keep that separate and you know, asking about the dog or whatever is fine. But if you're asking about a bunch of things and you really need responses to two or three things,

go ahead and put those in three separate emails because then it's helping the other person. So then the other person can, once they've done one, if they responded to one, they can archive or delete that email and the other two are still there. So they still haven't done those. So it's kind of like if you're asking somebody to do three different things and you have to have it in your subject line, that really kind of tells you they need to be three separate emails. I had this story about email that I was going to,

tell you, but it really wasn't about email. It was about an internal wiki. But it's the same sort of concept. We've got an internal wiki where several colleagues and I are discussing an architectural change, a change proposal on a wiki page. And I started getting working on this and realized that I didn't think the change was actually possible. So

What I did is I thought it was all these thoughts about why it wasn't possible running around in my head. And so I went up and I started writing bullet points down to say, here's some background information. Here's some relevant facts about our current system. Here's some relevant facts about the framework that we're using and the changes that we want to do. And then I came to the conclusion that because of those, the

change we were trying to make was not possible. And as soon as I wrote that down, it freed up stuff in my head and I looked at all the things and realized there was a constraint there that wasn't a real constraint. There was a data store, some system state that was being held in one place. And what I really realized was that was the problem. If the state was moved somewhere else, if it was moved out

of that, if that was in the class, moved out of the class and made it globally available, like through an accessor function or something, or a little database entry, that would make the whole system work. So in getting all that done, I figured out how to solve the problem. So my intent was to argue the case that the change was not possible. And the effect of writing it down

was to free up enough, get all that detail out of my head so that I could look at it separately. And actually, I slept on it and came back and looked at it and realized, oh my God, that one constraint is not real. We can move it out. It doesn't change the API at all. And so I actually did. I slept on it. I came back the next day and I was able to, I was actually able to see the solution better and

was able to prototype. I had been working on this for days and after just getting it out of my head, I was able to prototype a working change in a couple hours. And then I am finished the entire system change in the rest of the day. Um, and just getting that out of my head freed me to be able to creatively think about the solution really was great. I also, um, in helping, I had two conversations with my colleagues about this.

And so their discussion really helped me with this. So of course, I also sent them a note and thanked them for working with me on the change. I'd also like to talk about other forms of writing. So that's wikis, internal wiki, email, little notes in a notebook. But I also do blog posts and wrote the same book twice. But

So blog posts, I started writing, when I started writing a blog, I just kind of wanted a technical blog, but I didn't want it. I didn't know what to put there. So at the time I was using the version control system clear case. That was so many years ago, but there were, there were things that I did that I did every day. I didn't need to write those down. I did them every day, but there were some commands that I did once in a while that

that I would always forget, and so I would always look them up. So I kind of wrote this, had this rule to myself that if I had to, if I researched something that I know I've researched before, so this is the second time I've had to research how to do something, then I would write a blog post so that I didn't have to research it again. I could just look at my own blog. It worked great. Now the same thing is kind of true for my book. I did not just write the book for myself, the Python Testing with PyTest.

But actually, it is also for me. So my copy of Python Testing with PyTest is totally beat up because it's at my desk. It's nearby all the time. I use it regularly. And actually, in that architectural change I was just talking about, there were like two parts that I had to look up. I needed to use a... This is irrelevant for just the concept of writing stuff down, but I'll tell you anyway.

So I had to use, for the solution, I had to use PyTest generate tests. It's a PyTest hook function. And I needed to use that to parameterize a fixture based on the values being passed in by a marker and with marker arguments. And then I had to either parameterize or not parameterize the fixture based on the value of those markers and how much parameterization was going to happen

And, and then also the value of the fixture needed to be available for the class or the tests also. And all of those pieces, um, you know, like I'm in our, just remember all that stuff. It's a little bit detail-y. So, um, I looked all those, those pieces up were in the book. So that was awesome. I was able to, I'm grateful for my past self for writing that stuff down and it helped me with the solution. So anyway, um,

From taking quick notes to taking notes during a meeting to taking notes during listening to a lecture or something and writing things down for myself to all of the things that I've written in blog posts and in the book, I'm grateful for all the time I've spent writing. So writing allows me to stop thinking about something, it allows me to listen better, and it allows me to remember things. It all seems so simple, but it's very powerful.

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