Nonlinear writing

In March 2024, I had a short Mastodon discussion with nicolas about how writing inspires writing and what my approach to drafts and thoughts is. Starting with a date from almost a year ago is a great kickoff to a blog post about nonlinear writing.

Our discussion led me to think about this topic for year, clarifying my thoughts, running into others' writing about the topic and shaping this blog post.

My earlier writing habit

For a long time, my approach to writing blog posts was very linear:

1. Get an idea
2. Research the idea if necessary
3. Write a post
4. Publish a post

This worked really well, especially with practical technical blog posts like the recipe-style blog posts that I enjoy writing. They document a single use case I had just learned at work or through my hobby projects. As such, they don’t need to gather more information to be useful and ready for publishing.

Current habit

Now in 2025, it's very common for ideas to marinate for a long time, even years, as I explore them more in depth, gather more perspectives and work on them in my notes.

As my note systems have evolved, my blog writing has become much more nonlinear and kind of parallel. The research step in the past was a "what do I need to learn more about this to finish writing" type of ordeal triggered by a specific blog post idea. These days, more and more of my blog posts start as ideas that land in my notes and then over time become blog posts.

Because I now take more notes where the motivation is not to write a blog post but to collect and gather notes for the sake of taking notes and understanding the world (and my own thoughts), I end up finding more interesting things through the connections.

Frequency bias in good use

Once you've made an idea tangible in the notes, you start to notice it pop up everywhere. This is a cognitive bias called frequency bias. If you start to pay attention to for example number 27, you suddenly start to notice it pop up everywhere and it can feel like the frequency of the number showing up is increasing when it's just you noticing them more often.

It can be a negative bias in some parts of life but when it's a tool for thinking and research, it's extremely powerful. I can plant a seed of an idea by making a note of it and I start noticing it more often. And because I notice it more often, I end up reading more about it and bringing in new ideas, learnings, perspectives and references to the note.

Eventually, those new ideas may grow into something that becomes interesting enough to be worth writing and publishing about.

Note-taking considered positive

Once again, my beloved notes are becoming more impactful in my life. One thing that enables this is that I've reached a situation where I manage to publish enough posts to keep up a steady weekly rhythm, giving the ideas in my notes time to grow slow and steady. Eventually I hope to reach a spot where every one of my evergreen blog posts has had enough time to grow and absorb ideas from the surrounding world.