This Summer, I’ve been doing something different, and it’s helped a lot. You should consider doing it too.

This is a notebook I was given a few months ago that changed the way I work on new projects. It’s just a simple notebook that I started writing stuff down in. For a while I had no idea what to do or what to work on, so instead I just wrote a bunch. I wrote down any ideas that came to me, concepts that I wanted to look into, and just general development related things. I started writing more when a friend of mine managed to talk me into buying a pair of fountain pens. They’re pretty nice to write with and definitely are a factor that made me start keeping a journal. But that’s not what this article is about.

The Journal Knows All

When I started writing in this journal, it helped me learn a lot of new things. Getting your thoughts on paper allows you to do just that. Get your thoughts somewhere else so you can see them in a new light. Writing about and explaining your ideas to yourself help you better understand what it is that you really want to do.

If you’re keeping a dev journal, you can just ramble on about all of your crazy ass ideas and maybe one of them will make enough sense to develop on. If you keep maintaining your journal it will eventually become an important part of your workflow. Whenever there’s a new development, I write about it. That helps me get to a point where I know what to do next. Writing about all of your questions will help the answers come out.

I highly recommend that you give it a try. Nothing is for everybody, but it’s certainly worth trying. So grab a good pen, a nice journal and get writing.