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Lying to Yourself Is an Underrated Productivity Tool
My dog does this thing sometimes where she eases her way into trouble. Whenever a pillow or table leg catches her eye as particularly chewable, she’ll mash her face against it and rub her nose back and forth, maintaining eye contact the whole time, as if to say: Just sniffing, can’t be mad. Often, she spends so long on this weird little preamble that by the time I notice she’s progressed to actually gnawing whatever it is, there’s already a hole in it.
We have a lot in common, in that this is also my preferred strategy for writing anything.
Earlier this week, argued on Forge that the way to get anything done is to, well, do the thing — to stop dancing around the edges with tangentially related tasks, and instead take the most straightforward path right through the task at hand. It’s great advice, if you already know what that path is. But when you’re staring down a blank page with very little idea of how to fill the space, may I suggest a different approach: Do the thing by pretending you aren’t.
In the process of writing this post, I: retyped the same sentence three times in a row, with a single word changed each time; wrote a nonsense string of words with no connective tissue; pasted in the half-formed thoughts I’d Slacked my colleagues, then tidied up the punctuation. It sounds like…
