I’ve been writing 1000 words every day for about 10 years now, and I’m still not always sure what I’m doing. Arguably, most of that output is terrible. Some days I manage maybe two hundred words before I run out of things to say and end up describing what I had for breakfast.

But those three years have changed how my brain works more than any other single habit, routine or belief in my life.

When people talk about daily writing, they mean it as career advice for aspiring novelists or bloggers. You’ll get better at the craft, build a portfolio, develop your voice etc etc. All true, probably.

I think we’re missing something bigger:

Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.

Thoughts are slippery. You can hold an opinion about something, carry it around for years, defend it in conversations, and never actually examine whether it makes any sense. I used to have all sorts of views about politics, relationships, productivity, etc. 

Then I started trying to write them down, and about half of them evaporated the moment I put them into sentences…

In conversation, if someone pokes a hole in your logic, you can say “well, you know what I mean” and move on. You can gesture vaguely at the general direction of your point. When you write, you can’t handwave. You can’t bluster and obfuscate your own ideas into oblivion. When you’re alone with a blank page, there’s nobody to rescue you with a charitable interpretation.

Your argument either holds together or it doesn’t.

Writing is thinking with the training wheels off.

I’m not claiming you need to write a daily philosophical treatise. My daily writing is usually mundane. I’ll work through why I’m annoyed about something in my work or home life, or try to figure out whether I actually need to move to a new note taking app or just want to want to move note taking apps for the sake of it. The topic matters less than the act of forcing vague feelings into specific words. Once something is written down, you can look at it up close. You can ask whether it’s actually true.

There’s a concept in programming called rubber duck debugging. When you’re stuck on a problem, you explain your code line by line to a rubber duck. The act of articulating the problem out loud helps you spot the bug. Daily writing is rubber duck debugging for your entire life. You explain yourself to the page, and suddenly the contradictions become visible.

I think part of why this works is that writing creates distance. When a thought is in your head, you’re too close to it. You’re inside it, experiencing it, identifying with it. But when you write it down, it becomes an object you can examine. Anxiety, written out, stops being a shapeless dread. And once you can see what it actually is, you can usually do something about it.

The act of processing experiences through writing seems to cement them. I remember conversations I wrote about years ago with startling clarity, while entire weeks where I didn’t write have blurred into nothing. Maybe writing creates hooks in memory. Maybe it just forces you to pay attention in an increasingly skewed attention economy.

Fair enough.

Everyone’s got limited hours and too many demands on them. 

But I think we’re probably talking about fifteen to twenty minutes here. 

Maybe thirty on a good day.

You’re not writing War and Peace. You’re writing enough to clarify one thought, work through one problem, capture one observation. That’s perhaps the length of three or four text messages to a friend, composed without chatGPT.

You don’t need interesting material. You’re not performing for an audience. You can write about why you chose the lunch you chose, or what you noticed on the walk to the store, or a single, unmarked moment in a conversation that stuck with you. The point isn’t to produce great content. The point is to practice putting thoughts into words.

I used to think clarity of thought was an innate trait some people had and others didn’t — that some people were just naturally logical and articulate. Everyone else was stuck thinking in circles and trailing off mid-sentence.

But I don’t believe that anymore.

I genuinely think clarity is a skill, and like most skills, you get better at it by practicing.

Writing  - every day -  is practicing thinking clearly over and over until it becomes almost natural.

If it feels like your thoughts are muddied, or you have trouble making decisions, or you keep having the same arguments with yourself on repeat, try writing for fifteen minutes a day. Try it for a month. Don’t do it with publication in mind, don’t do it for posterity, don’t do it for the likes, don’t even write for your future self. Just write for the sake of it. Write to see what your own thoughts look like when you force them into sentences.

You might be surprised by what’s actually in there.

The practical upshot is probably this: if your bottleneck is clarity of thought rather than execution, daily writing is worth trying. And if you try it for a month and it doesn’t help, well, that tells you something too — maybe your thinking is already pretty clear, or maybe your problems are in a different domain entirely.

Worst case: you’ve lost twenty minutes a day that you’d likely have lost scrolling your phone anyway.

Best case, you’ve debugged your own cognition.