Thought Lab

I recently met someone through one of the Slack communities I’m in. He just came off a sabbatical and was telling me about his journaling practice. Specifically, he mentioned how he has specific journals for each of the projects he’s working on.

What a wonderful idea, I thought.

I’ve been journaling daily for over five years, and it’s now a foundational habit. I don’t believe you can truly understand your thinking until you put words down. You have to interrogate your thoughts, and writing is the best method of mental interrogation.

So I wanted to expand my journaling practice to include project journaling. Today, I practice what’s called Interstitial Journaling, where you write throughout the day. I detail everything I’m doing and thinking. This creates clarity and provides a historical artifact I can reference. Every day, I review an “On This Day” view of my Notion journal database, which shows each journal entry for the current day as far back as I have them. I love this ritual. You only understand your progress when you look at how far you’ve come.

Okay, so how did this come to life for me? I organize everything in Notion, but it’s not about the tool. I built a space where I can create entries for each project I’m working on. And I took it even further with entries for questions, decisions, and other categories. This is why I call it the “Thought Lab”. It’s a dedicated space for me to work with my thoughts to drive clarity.

Let me show you how to build your own.

Note: If you’re not interested (or ready) in a daily journal practice, this is a great way to start using writing as your tool to drive clarity.

Project Journaling

Start with the projects you’re working on. They are the bodies of work that garner our attention and focus our time, energy, and effort. They require continual thinking and depth of understanding.

For each project, write out any thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, or tensions you’re actively working through. This is what you’ll journal on.

Just start writing. The beauty of journaling is that it’s for you, not anyone else. You just need to start writing and keep going. But this only works when you surrender to the experience and ignore the inner discomfort. At the end of that discomfort lies clarity. Just keep going.

I have three core projects I’m focused on, so here are some real examples I journaled on this week, and how they sparked momentum:

• “What should be my core focus?”: This was the question that guided one journaling session. I wrote every thought on this topic to get to the core idea. The process gave me insight into the highest and best use of my time. It was well worth the 30 minutes.
• “Feature A vs. Feature B”: This was a decision to determine which of two features would make the most sense to build. We only have enough resources for one, so I wanted to wrestle with the different paths. This spawned a conversation with the engineers on the project, and we found a path to deliver on both.
• “Strategic switch to online writing”: I love writing my newsletter and on my blog. I’ve always loved writing—both prose and code. So this prompt was an exploration of focusing on more writing, including more online publications.

Category Journaling

I mentioned writing beyond just projects—the decisions, questions, and other categories. They exist outside of your projects, and they deserve dedicated space for exploration.

The same process applies: List out all the decisions you’re considering, questions you’re pondering, or other things you’re thinking about. And just start writing in whatever time allotment feels right for you. You can keep it open-ended or time-box it to 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

You can expand the categories, but these are the ones I started with. And here are some examples I journaled on recently:

• “How is writing prose like writing code?”: I alluded to my love of code and prose, so this was a musing on the similarities between them. While less outcome-driven than the other entries, this felt more like a creative writing project. It was cathartic.
• “We’re in an open field”: This was an idea that came from conversations about early discovery work. This was an analogy I was using to help the team share a mental model of the work, which required deeper exploration and understanding.
• “Moving fast and staying flexible”: This was another topic related to early discovery work. I always use the “fast and flexible” mantra to refer to moving fast, but staying flexible while we learn. Again, this was another exploration to improve the concept so I could communicate to the team.

Building Context

A happy byproduct of this new process was how it enabled me to work with AI. Each of these journal entries became goldmines of context, which is the lifeblood of quality AI output.

For example, writing about “Feature A vs. Feature B” enabled me to copy and paste the entry to ChatGPT, and use it as the foundation to further expand my thinking. This led to the creation of a new document that detailed the plan for the next development cycle.

There’s an important lesson here—and a critical point related to effective use of AI—that I want I point out: We’re not short-circuiting our critical thinking and expecting AI to do the work for us. We’re doing the hard work, writing our thoughts, interrogating them, and reaching clarity. You can’t prompt insights. In the same way, you can’t expect high-fidelity outputs from low-fidelity inputs. Leveraging this writing as the starting point to expand our thinking is what I’d consider an effective use of AI.

It’s an enhancement, not a replacement.

Getting Started

Here’s a simple process you can try out this week to improve your clarity:

1. List out all your projects and any decisions, questions, or other categories. Write all of your thoughts without editing. Constrain the time if you want to.
2. List out any decisions, questions, or other categories you’re generally thinking about. Follow the same process of writing without editing.
3. Use your writing as the starting point for expanded thinking with AI. Drop in this glorious context, and use AI as an enhancement to think bigger.