The beginning of a new year is a great opportunity to reflect and set new goals. Writing is one thing I want to dedicate more time to in 2020, and this article summarizes my motivation, thoughts, and feelings about this goal.

The Motivation

Writing is an essential activity in my life. It takes many different forms, each serving a specific purpose. The two most important ones: a diary and a bullet journal. In the diary, I reflect on who I am, and who I want to be. And in the bullet journal I keep my goals, plans, and ideas.

The reason writing is so important to me, is that it is by far the best tool I have found so far to organize my thoughts. I am especially fond of writing with a pen in paper notebooks. Neither my diary nor my journal are digital. When writing by hand, I have to be fully engaged, and the slow speed of writing gives me enough time to really think about the subject.

So why start writing digitally, and why publicly? As much as I love my physical notebooks, they are not the best tools for certain types of writing. Information captured in them is not always easy to find, and impossible to share. With each year, I feel like I come in contact with more and more ideas, thoughts, and lessons I want to discuss with friends, colleagues, and persons interested in the same topic. And none of my tools currently supports this.

The Goal

Adding this site to my writing tools serves two purposes. First, it enables me to produce content that I can share and discuss with others. I can reflect on my goals for 2020 in private, capture them in by journal, and once I am clear on what it is I want to achieve, write up a summary I can publish here. The same is true for project ideas that I can explore in breadth and depth in my journal, to then publish a condensed version here for discussion.
Second, it enables me to produce an indexable knowledge base. One of my goals for 2020 is reading more books, and part of that goal is to summarize the lessons I learn in short reviews. Put in a physical journal, this knowledge is lost to me. Putting it here means I can search, reference, and review it any time.

Setting up this site is also meant as a motivation to write more. Since it is such an important habit in my life, I want to give it more attention in 2020. While I could increase the time I spend with my diary and journal, it would only offer diminishing returns. Adding a new tool, and a new category of topics, to my portfolio offers a much greater return on investment.

The Reader

Having explained my motivation and goal for this site, it might be wise to explain who I am writing for. The answer is simple: me. This might surprise you. Is it not the goal to produce content to share?

The reason I write is to organize my thoughts. This is, first and foremost, an intrinsic motivation. Its benefit would be lost if I were to do it to appeal to someone else, or if I were to do it for financial or other personal gains. I still want to be able to discuss some of my thoughts, and maybe more importantly my ideas, with friends and colleagues. But it is not for them that I write.

It is of–course–my hope that some of my writings are interesting, inspiring, or helpful to you, dear visitor of this site. I hope they are to me as well...