In Praise of Badly Formatted Word Documents

I've been thinking a lot lately about what work leaves behind.

Not the obvious things – the promotions, the titles, the certificates, the projects you can list on your CV. Not the stuff of a motivational LinkedIn post either.

I mean the more equine things. The ones I think are actually the most powerful. The skill of seeing. The habits of attention. The questions you learn to ask. The things you start to notice that other people walk straight past.

I came to this by way of the puzzle rooms – the breakout rooms full of hard problems and puzzles that are popular at software testing conferences.

My early career was in software testing. I still keynote testing events today. And for years, I walked straight past those rooms.

For a long time I read that as evidence I was a lesser tester than the people inside them. They were brilliant, and I knew it. It took me the better part of twenty years to understand that we were all being taught the same thing underneath the craft – the puzzle-solvers every bit as much as me.

Testing was teaching us to see. Every job, discipline, role and position does the same.

They pointed it at the problems and puzzles in front of them, beautifully. I kept pointing mine at why we were solving the problems at all and how to make space for those who indeed loved to solve them.

Same gift. Aimed differently.

And only recently did I understand the other half of the story. I'd been leaving myself a record of it all along.

For about ten years, I wrote about testing on a blog, creatively named – The Social Tester. Not strategically. There was no five-year content plan. No path to monetisation. Nobody had told me I was building a personal brand, and I wasn't trying to become a thought leader – which was probably a good thing for all involved.

Instead, I was noticing things and writing them down.

Sometimes on the blog to teach others. Sometimes because I wanted to work something out. Sometimes because I was annoyed about something – which generated more posts than I care to admit. Sometimes because I'd found an idea I had to think my way through. Sometimes for the sheer pleasure of writing something.

Do that for long enough – ten years, say – and something interesting happens. You build an archive. And eventually the archive starts showing you things about yourself you couldn't have known while you were making it.

You spot what you were interested in before you knew it was interesting. You see the questions that kept coming back. The ideas you abandoned, the ones you misunderstood, the ones you got better at saying more clearly. You see the seeds of frameworks and systems and work you do today. You see one piece leading to another, sometimes across years, often across completely unrelated jobs.

The archive becomes a record of how you learned to see.

I think that's a wonderful argument for writing things down. And it has very little to do with becoming a writer.

You don't have to publish a blog. You don't need an audience. You don't need a newsletter, a podcast, a YouTube channel, or an elaborate content system designed by a social media influencer.

A notebook will do. A text file. Apple Notes. A post-it. A folder of photographs will do. And if Word is your thing, then a collection of badly formatted Word documents will do just fine.

The important thing is to catch some of your thinking while you're still inside the work that's producing it.

Because work changes the way you see.

The receptionist learns to read a room. The teacher learns to feel the exact moment attention leaves the room. The person who fixes coffee machines learns that the fault is rarely where the noise is coming from. The train driver learns about time, distance and consequence. The tester learns to distrust the obvious answer.

Then you move on – sometimes into a different role entirely – and you carry all of it with you. You build on it. Adapt it. Grow it.

The trouble is, we tend to notice the destination. The output. The kind of thing that goes on a CV. We forget the accumulation.

We say things like I was just a receptionist, or I was only a teacher, or I used to be a tester – as if those were earlier versions of ourselves that have since been deleted.

They haven't. They're right there, in the way you look and notice now. And if you've kept notes along the way, you can actually watch it happen.

That's the part I find rather fascinating. Your work doesn't just give you experience. It keeps changing the lens through which you meet the next thing.

You notice something because of what you learned to see before. You write it down. Writing makes you examine it. Examining it changes what you notice next time. The next job hands you another lens. You add it to the collection.

Over time, the boundaries between the jobs becomes less interesting. The thread, however, gets more interesting. The thread of how you see, and think, and act. The one that weaves all those different experiences into something that's unmistakably you.

I've started thinking of this as a kind of personal commonplace book. Not a portfolio of achievements – a catalogue of attention. A place where you leave evidence of what caught your eye, and how that changed over time.

And maybe that's the real value of writing it down, whether you publish to thousands of people or only to yourself.

You're giving your future self something to find.

I have a shelf of old writing that proves it. Some of it is more than ten years old. I can open it now and meet a version of myself still trying to work out things I have much better language for today. He was often wrong. He was often insufferable – I found some of my old pieces genuinely cringe worthy to reread.

But he was paying attention. And thinking. And growing. And working out a way to look at the world.

And I'm delighted he bothered to write some of it down. Because I can see the thread now.

The things I noticed about testing became things I noticed about communication. Those became things I noticed about organisations. Those became questions about learning, attention, value, and the climate in which people do good work.

The jobs changed. The seeing didn't so much change as accumulate.

This bit took me a while to get straight. That accumulated seeing doesn't disappear. It's in you whether you wrote a word of it down or not – shaping how you meet the next thing, regardless. Keeping notes doesn't preserve the seeing. It preserves the thread. The visible line running through all of it. You keep the seeing either way. What you lose, without a trail, is the ability to look back and see how you came by it.

And that matters more than you'd expect.

There's a huge amount of hard-won noticing locked inside people's working lives that never becomes visible – even to the people who own it. Not because it left them. Because they never left themselves a way to trace it. They change jobs, change careers, retire, and the thread goes quiet. The seeing stays. The story of how it was made loses it's vividness.

So I recommend you capture more of it. Not because everything has to become content. Because you might want to find it again.

If there's something you keep noticing at work, write it down. If there's a question that keeps surfacing, write it down. If you catch yourself thinking something's interesting — stop for a second, and write the interesting thing down.

You don't need to know why it matters. You probably won't know. I certainly didn't. And that's the useful bit.

Ten years on, you might look back and find that the thing you thought you were merely noticing was the beginning of the next thing.

And you'll be very glad you left yourself a breadcrumb.