CJ Eller

The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn't have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It's as if your mind were to say, “Look, I'm only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you're not collecting them in some trusted way, I won't give you that many. But if you're actually doing something with the ideas — even if it's just recording them for later evaluation — then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another,” etc.

This passage from David Allen's Getting Things Done makes me think of blogging as such a mechanism for holding your thoughts and continually reflecting them back to you.

When I took a break from posting here, I understated blogging's function as an external brainstorming system. Only after a week & a half of blogging again, my mind races with ideas that wouldn't have occurred to me if I didn't have a place to hold my thoughts.

I think about Tom Critchlow's question in his Januray 2022 – Map of Inquiry — “How do we get more people blogging?”

Networked writing relies on… the network! I have a variety of friends and contacts that I wish blogged more. How to encourage / support and nurture more people writing online.

Could blogging as an external brainstorming system be one part of the puzzle for encouraging people to blog? Makes me wonder about David Allen's above characterization of the mind but geared towards blogging:

“Look, I'm only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you're not collecting them in some trusted way like on a blog, I won't give you that many. But if you're actually doing something with the ideas — like posting them on a blog — then here, have a bunch!”