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.