Don’t Write Without Doing This First

Warm your brain up by typing out other people’s words

Image: Alora Griffiths/Unsplash

I often write in very broken chunks of time: during the 20 minutes between meetings, with hard deadlines, or late at night (not by choice). In these moments, there’s a lot stacked against me: distraction, despair, and time pressure—it hardly looks like the author Neal Stephenson’s “four quiet hours.”