For developers, we’re often building complex systems and we try to build and hold all that complexity in our mind at once. Any interruption will cause those fragile thoughts to tumble like a house of cards. But writing down those thoughts as they come, even if the writing is gibberish to anyone but me, helps me solidify those thoughts. I’m able to recover from interruptions much quicker.
This was recently written by Beekey Cheung on dev.to. Beekey highlights one of the single most important benefits to keeping a "Programmer's Shop Manual": Although one might never return to it to figure out how you once solved a problem, it's there to hold up the teetering masterpiece of complexity that we, as programmers, produce daily.