Writing Every Day 06: Writing *Every* Day?

The observant among you may have noticed that no posts went up on Saturday or Sunday, which rightfully breaks my chain of writing every day. While that's true and you'd be within your rights to call foul on me, I wanted to take a moment to explain the reasons why.

The first reason is one that any person in any field experience at one time or another: family obligation. No matter what I'm doing, my family has first right of refusal to my time. This past weekend I spent a healthy amount of time with my wife, our roommate, and one of our close friends. Drinks were drunk. Food was eaten. A good time was had by all.

When we're working on something, it can be easy to let our social obligations slip by the side of the road. Rather than let that happen, I intend to temper my work and this ongoing writing experiment with time spent not working. Not working is often just as important as working. It gives you time to rest and evaluate what you're doing. It gives you the ability to learn from the errors in your previous work, and gives you a place to start from when you begin again. This leads to my second point.

There's something known as the creative pause. It is, I think, the basis for many productivity techniques like the Pomodoro Technique. While the real method is much more involved, a key component is that, for every major work that you undertake, you need to break it down into smaller chunks divided by periods of rest. Like organizing writing into coherent paragraphs gives the reader a place to pause between pieces of information, this lets you break away from your work for a moment to digest what you've done and prepare to tackle the next chunk. Trying to steamroll through large efforts can be akin to a wall of unbroken text. Not only is it tiresome to process, you can lose critical information among the clutter.

So, in this "Writing Every Day" experiment, expect there may be the occasional break in the flow. Sometimes I'll need to step away to clear my head and strategize on how to tackle the topics I have coming up. Other times the family will decide for me that I need to be available for them. When I can I'll try to keep these pauses to reasonable times—weekends, holidays, and so forth—and to a reasonable length. And if you haven't, I recommend trying out the Pomodoro Technique or something similar. You may find after half an hour of work, or a full hour, that stepping away for a few minutes gives you the ability to solve issues that previously seemed insurmountable.

Until next time.