I’ve had increased interest in writing throughout this year. In addition to being a pleasant and fulfilling activity, it shown a number of benefits in my everyday life and career:

  • Composing emails became faster and easier. When you have to reply to a couple of dozen emails a day, speed and attention to details matters. Writing more taught me to write more concise emails which are easy to read.
  • Writing a lot isn’t a problem anymore. If I have to write documentation, comment code, or just put together a very long email - I’m not put off by the idea. I’m excited about it.
  • Typing speed went up. I already touch type, and constant writing practice increases the acquired speed. Fast typing makes life easier, speeding up mundane tasks, freeing up brain power for more costly activities.
  • It’s easy to keep a condensed work log to highlight the issues of the day. Tough programming issues, “Eureka!” moments, meeting notes - this historical data saved me hours or even days of repeating my mistakes.

A while ago, I’ve heard of a thing called “750 words”, a site built around a challenge to write 750 words a day in order to improve writing skills and unleash creativity. This looked like a great idea, and I decided to give it a shot. I prefer to keep my personal entries offline, and I decided not to use the provided service, but to keep a set of plain text files on my local machine. Which worked out just fine. It’s all just text after all.

I lasted for 10 days in a row, which I am proud of (filling up approximately 3 pages a day was no easy task for me). I started of with silly entries about not knowing what to write about, and finished with a piece of a fiction story. That’s a considerable improvement.

By the end of the challenge I was mentally exhausted. But it taught me a very important lesson: the more you write, the better you become. And that’s one of the main reasons I keep crafting new entries for this blog.

This happened half a year ago, I just never got around to writing about it. I will go ahead and start another 750 words spree today. Maybe this time I’ll be able to make it last for the whole month.

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