One thing that made writing really frustrating for me early on was trying to complete a draft of an idea that I clearly didn’t have enough time to express.
For example, there are many days when I have 15 minutes—maybe five!—to write. If I was still “stuck” in the middle of a draft that I’d expected to get done, then I’d feel really disappointed and upset. I didn’t know it at the time, but those ideas needed a lot more thinking—which I did by writing.
I would need to put up with the feeling of incompleteness—and deliberately interrupt my brain’s deep processing on the topic, knowing I’d forget and need to rework it later—or I would need to make more time to work on it right at that time. I hated this feeling of being interrupted, and I thought it was just a less flattering part of my personality that I needed to work on. Why couldn’t I just let it go?
It turns out that the solution wasn’t suppressing it, but learning to choose better.
As I started writing this blog every day, I got more practice choosing my ideas more intentionally. I started developing a better intuition for what I could realistically get done.
If I knew I needed to leave the house in 15 minutes, I would develop a draft that felt like it could be easy to pick up and put down.
Because of the time pressure, the subject would be simple—probably something I’d been talking about with friends or coworkers, or something my mind had already mulled over and figured out. I just needed to say it. It would be something that I could probably say in five sentences or so.
I also better intuited which topics I hadn’t quite figured out yet, and needed more work. As I experienced fewer interruptions, I was also less agitated and I naturally learned to be okay with picking these up later, maybe in a day with a more open-ended schedule and less time pressure. Or, I would need to work with the expectation that I wasn’t going to be done by the end of the session—and that was fine. Progress was enough.
This relatively minor adjustment—more ergonomic in nature than anything—made a huge effect on how happy I was when I wrote. It felt very intuitive, and I’m glad I got to put it together in writing.