We live in an increasingly complex world. Externally, there’s a never-ending barrage of emails, calls, and taps on the shoulder competing for our attention. Internally, there’s an equally never-ending parade of ridiculous thoughts that do their best to keep us fixed in place.

We don’t have time to think.

Given that so many of us these days are knowledge workers, where it is essentially our job to think our way through the world’s problems, this presents a significant problem.

What can we do? We can write.

I recently wrote about how, in today’s complex world, discovery is indistinguishable from creation. It turns out that writing things down forces us to discover what’s really going on in our heads. The act of writing is a forcing function—a process that literally lets us shape our thoughts and opinions as we discover them.

We don’t have time to think, so we don’t have time not to write.