Ed Blog / Why Write At All

A Record You Can Return To In Three Years

Memory rewrites the difficult parts out of the story; a written account does not.

Professional memory is unreliable in a specific and predictable way. It keeps the outcome and discards the process. Three years after you redesigned a unit you will remember that you redesigned it and that it went better, and you will have lost almost everything that would let you do it again: the sequence you tried first, the point at which you realised the sequence was wrong, the compromise you settled for because the timetable would not allow the version you wanted. Memory also smooths. The account you carry forward is tidier than the thing that happened, because tidiness is easier to store.

A contemporaneous written record resists both losses. Reading your own post from three years ago is an odd experience, usually a slightly humbling one. The writer sounds more certain than you now think was warranted, or more anxious about something that turned out not to matter, or is visibly wrestling with a problem you have since solved so thoroughly you had forgotten it was ever a problem. That is useful information about your own development, and it is not available from any other source. Nobody else was taking notes on you.

There is a practical dimension too. Written accounts of what you tried and why are the raw material for a great many later tasks: explaining a decision, preparing for a conversation about your work, inducting someone into a course you built, deciding whether to repeat something. You are not writing them for those purposes and you should not, but they turn out to serve them. The record is a by-product, and it is often the part you value longest.