# The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Writing Things Down
There's a pattern I keep noticing in how people solve hard problems. It's not about being smarter. It's not about having more experience. It's about writing things down.
## The debugging story
A senior engineer I worked with had a rule: before asking anyone for help with a bug, write down everything you know about it. What you expected. What happened instead. What you've tried. What you haven't tried and why.
She estimated that 70% of the time, people solved their own bug while writing the description. The act of organizing your thoug
writing-things-down.md