The final nugget from The Slow Hunch chapter is about documentation. It’s really simple and it has two elements.
First, it’s a best practice to document your ideas. Write your hunches down. It helps you reference them later.
Second, and more importantly, documenting your hunches is an effective mechanism for clarifying your thinking and exploring your ideas.
I love this notion, as you would probably guess about someone who is spending a lot of time writing about books and ideas. Writing forces you to internalize something. Actually, I take that back – writing forces you to at least “process” something, and processing an idea – taking it in and spitting it back out – drastically increases the likelihood that you internalize it (commit it to your brain).
Also, writing something down forces you to explicitly communicate the idea. It’s very difficult to be fuzzy when writing about an idea, although it’s certainly possible, as you can see in many of my shittier posts.
While it’s not foolproof, writing down hunches and ideas helps you to clarify them, and it also gives you an opportunity to explore them beyond where they might have been in your mind.
Document. Reference. Process. Clarify. Explore. These are the benefits of writing about your hunches.