Evolving Documents of Life
Part of the way I live my life (and gently recommend others live theirs) is to use words to bridge gaps between our times of thoughts. Humans are a thin layer of smarts on top of many layers of instinct, and most of the time we're not thinking much, depending on self-programmed habits to get us through our day and hopping up into thinking for brief moments to handle what habits don't. We're fortunate to be able to use thinking for other things - feeding the narratives of our lives, planning, pondering ethics, philosophy, and perhaps creating stories. Documents can be like a suspension bridge between the largely unthinking moments of ourselves. The where of those documents can differ.
Computers have been a big part of my life from about age six onwards (when my dad started to teach me to program). My career reflects it (being a mix of neuroscience, computer infrastructure, and software engineering), as does my lifestyle. It's rare that I don't have a lot of computing power and storage with me. I've organised my thoughts on papers (and still often doodle - my home has a lot of notebooks and pads of paper with the accumulated random thoughts of years), although starting after college I switched to more of a digital version of the same because searchability is pretty nice. For many years, this was in the form of a document called "todo" because it started as a todo list (and contained many separate todos, from shopping lists to what I am doing today to longer-term stuff) and grew into a gigantic document. For me this was part of a definite era of computing - one where I built a lot of the software I used everyday, and had collections of music, art, videos, and other stuff that I passed along from laptop to laptop, desktop to desktop. Starting on DOS, moving through OS/2, and settling on Linux for a long time. It worked well.
The cloud hit me personally - as new devices (portable MP3 players like the Diamond Rio and a variety of successors) began to accompany the laptop and were more convenient, I started to need to manage to put things on them (elaborate scripts); this moved to phones, and eventually this all broke the model I was used to - I could either stick to laptops and give up on all the new conveniences, or try to get all my content synchronised to devices where I wasn't writing any of the software; I gave up my MP3/OGG collection and moved to a cloud music provider, I stopped collecting mpeg/avi/.. files and found what I wanted (sometimes) on Youtube, and for my todo file, now massive with years of scribbling into it (rarely deleting things), I gave it up for cloud-based note-taking apps with separate notes for each thing I wanted. I gained a lot in convenience, but lost a lot in how well the solutions fit me. I no longer worried that my laptop would die and I'd lose some of my collection of various things, but because all my data was in the cloud I couldn't flexibly pull and push it through various software or tailor interfaces just for me. I still sometimes think about going back, or wonder what it'd take to expose these cloud systems to let me seamlessly use them on the Linux workstations that I still am most comfortable on. Music and video are probably a lost cause there - I don't want to fuss with all those formats and figure out high-scale storage so I can play a video collection or music on my phone (as nice as it would be to know that no expiration of agreements between companies could result in things I've collected going away). For text, I think it could work.
What really matters, even between living in Google Keep (my current cloud note-taking solution, which I've used for many years) and a todo file that I open in vim, is that I nearly always have somewhere to type that I can reach on short notice, that's searchable, that accepts a lot of text, that lets me edit anything there. It also matters that I keep the habits of needing/using such a thing. I know other habits are possible; some people I've known send paper letters to friends and family (even now) as a way of recording their thoughts, not caring about losing access to them (or searchability) but adding other functions to their needs - being known and keeping social ties. In the past I kept in touch with a few people like this, writing letters back, but my habits/needs are too different; my document-self is an extension of my personal-self.
At work, for the past many workplaces, I do a close variant of this - every day I open a new document (currently on Dropbox Paper) which gets a stream-of-consciousness dump of what I'm doing, continually. It looks like a conversation, and it has a lot of detail - I rarely worry about being interrupted or forgetting things because most things are in the doc. I sometimes share these with coworkers, and I hope that these things are useful in past jobs after I've left.
To write a lot doesn't guarantee we develop or maintain adeptness with the written word, nor clarity of thought, nor brilliance or other traits. I think it helps us give our thoughts a permanence, whatever other specifics it might give, and that this permanence is particularly important given the shape of human congnition (which more resembles an occasional sprint than a marathon). I also find that the best way to know someone is to read what they've written if they like to write, although care should be taken not to extrapolate from this how we likely would interact with them - there are many things (like appearance and accent and identity and various strategies to get something) that complicate real-world relationships beyond what we might expect from a theoretical raw meeting of minds.