Writing Orders the Mind — The Science Behind Management by Essay

When our executives wrote their life essays, one said: "I finally organized what my life has been." That sense of writing-as-organizing has a research pedigree.

Psychology has long studied the effects of repeatedly writing about one's own significant experiences; a well-known line of studies reports beneficial changes in people who wrote for some minutes daily across several days.

Writing gives swirling events the shape of a story — with a beginning and an end — and a shaped experience leaves the whirlpool of rumination and settles onto a shelf. Writing also frees working memory: worries held only in the head occupy the brain's workbench, and lowering them onto paper clears it.

You don't become smarter; your bench becomes wider. Having executives write, recommending it to staff, writing 150 essays myself — this is no spiritualism but the cheapest, surest method of ordering the mind. What is still sitting on your workbench?

What do you work for?