I'm looking at a page of my notes entitled, "How can I reduce the amount of willpower I need for writing". Staring in horror, in fact, at my "research" and "thinking".

Damn it. Reading those books on productivity felt so good. Like I was doing some proper adulting. But my self-congratulatory thoughts were distinctly premature. What the hell is this rubbish?

The utter guff I'm looking at is the most lightweight, stream-of-consciousness nonsense you can image. The ideas are, at best, half-baked. Severely underdone, in any case, and seem to be jumbled up completely at random. "OK. No problem. I just need to refine this a bit. Give it some shape and flow."

Three days later and I'm still staring at it. Why can't I get my thinking straight?

Then I realised that I already know how to do this.

Today it occurred to me that in my work as a software engineer I'm always coming across code that is too tangled and confusing to understand. Some poor sleep-deprived programmer will have left a trail of devastation in the codebase that needs to be cleaned and tidied before it can even be properly understood, let alone before more work can be done.

But no-one can immediately see what the end result of transforming a 300-line function of doom will look like. All the data structures, and the neat, single-purpose functions, and how they fit together in a beautifully architected bit of software. That would take god-like powers.

I just start with tidying a couple of lines. Any lines. It doesn't really matter. And then another couple. I extract some of that tidied code into a function. Give it a nice readable name. Put it in a separate utility class.

Soon, after twenty or thirty tiny individual re-factorings, I have a bunch of solid high-level components. It's much easier to think about how they fit together. I can use them like lego bricks. Move them around a bit. Try out a few different configurations to see what works. And voila. Job done.

So, I've tried using the same methodology with my notes. It works!

I came back to the page that was giving me so much trouble and picked the first micro-idea I saw and worked on expressing it in two (fairly) clear and concise sentences. Then another, and another.

I created whole new pages for some ideas, just leaving a link showing on the original page (I'm using Roam Research). This really helps to remove some of the low-level detail, leaving just the high-level concepts on the original page that I can then think about more easily.

Possibly this process may seem ridiculously obvious, but it has been an absolute breakthrough for me in my writing process. I hope it helps someone else. 🚢