Sometimes you have writers block, it happen even if you need to write an e-mail, a blog post or some software, not just if you are writing books, you are sitting on your chair, your hands are on the keyboard but nothing comes out, one way to get past that is to find a simpler easier version of what you have to do and do that first, for example:
Writing a good long blog post about technical subject that requires research is difficult, writing a short rant about some minor computing annoyance is easy.
Designing a new web site is difficult, tweaking something small to get some minor improvement in the layout of a site is easy.
Writing a new module for a software product is difficult, fixing a big complicated bug can also be difficult but there are always small easy bugs you can fix.
The common thing in all those examples is that there is something relatively simple and easy you can do that can put you into the state of mind needed to work on something complicated.
After writing that short unimportant blog post you’ll be in a “writing mood” and it will be easier to tackle that large technical post.
And worse case, even if this doesn’t help and you still have “writers block” (or whatever the equivalent is for your job) after finishing the small task – at least you did something productive instead of staring at the string feeling bad about not doing anything.
posted @ Monday, July 13, 2009 3:56 PM