168: Five Ways to Reduce Overwhelm When Writing (aka Thinking)

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If you're feeling overwhelmed by writing or working on a big idea, remind yourself it is a privilege to tackle big ideas. It is a joy to give your brain a meaty, juicy puzzle to work on.

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We all know how intimidating a blinking cursor on a blank page can can be. Of course. Now with tools like ChatGPT and AI even being built into Notion, the tool that I use to outline episodes like this one, we're not really stuck starting from scratch anymore. Even for today's episode, I put in the title that I was thinking and five talking points. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a 5,000 word transcript for this episode. Now, I'm not going to use most of it, but that's an example of getting a little help going from blank page to to some momentum. You may have noticed that in the last few solo episodes there's been a theme I've been covering topics related to books, writing, and publishing. That's because I pulled a handful of the most common questions that I get when people submit to Access the Author Toolkit. If you want to check that out, it's@itsfreetime.com authors and so today I'm going to talk about four ways to reduce overwhelm when writing. Now that can go for writing a book, which is probably the most complex type of writing you could tackle unless you're working on a PhD dissertation. But it can also apply to creating articles or podcast episodes anytime where you're intimidated or overwhelmed to start writing. I hope this episode helps you break the ice a little bit. Now there's two mindset shifts that I believe are important even before I share some of the tactical tools. First, I love what author Nassim Taleb says about writing? He says that if you, the author, are bored when writing, or I would add, overwhelmed, feeling, friction, it's just feeling like a drag, then so will your reader be. So he has a personal policy of stopping to write anything at all when he's bored and pulling back, reflecting, seeing if he needs to go a different direction. That in a way, it's altruistic selfishness, that he selfishly wants to be excited about what he's writing, what he's working on. Otherwise, if he's not excited, if he's bored, then surely the reader will be too. And that's why I've loved his books so much. Like Black Swan, fooled by randomness, they're so delightful. You can tell he's having fun with the process. So that's the first thing that I take into any writing project that I have. And that brings me to the second mindset, which is do a quick check. Are you overwhelmed by writing or are you overwhelmed by the thinking required before you sit down to write? Let's use the metaphor of a meal kit. Meal kits are so great because they reduced the friction for a lot of us about what to cook, what's the recipe? Do we have all the ingredients, all the right spices, and just the right amounts. When a meal kit arrives, it's already divvied up for you. You know what your meals are on what days, and then you get to do the joy of assembly. I think of writing very similarly, that if you are sitting down at a blank screen and a blinking cursor trying to think, of course you're going to be overwhelmed, of course you're going to get blocked. The thinking needs to happen in advance. All that hard work of coming up with your unique concepts and anecdotes and research and your spin on whatever it is you're going to write or speak about, that happens in advance. So that by the time you sit down at the computer, which is probably where you're going to start writing, or at least sketching out an outline for whatever content content you're creating, you're not really thinking. You're transcribing or assembling a recipe that already exists, ideally outside of yourself, what Tiago Forte calls a second brain. I'll share how I use notion in this way. So it's like that meal kit. You're not coming up with what you're going to cook for dinner when you're standing in front of the stove, of course you're going to get cooker's block. Of course you're going to be wondering if you have the right ingredients and get frustrated when you realize that something crucial is missing. So in addition to finding a sense of self entertainment, as my friend Penny calls it, making sure that you're jazzed, you're excited about the ideas that you're about to put down on paper or digital paper. You also want to be sure that you've done 80 to 90% of the thinking in advance so that by the time you sit down to do something like this, record an episode, write an article, work on your book, you're transcribing, there's a meal kit in your mind, and now your job is to take all those ingredients and weave them together or combine them together to stick with a true cooking metaphor and then bake them. And remember from one of the early chapters of Free Time, how we bake is as important as what we make. Have fun with this process. Again, if you're feeling overwhelmed by writing or working on a big idea, remind yourself it is a privilege to tackle big ideas. It is a joy to give your brain a meaty, juicy puzzle to work on, like creating a book or an ongoing series of podcast episodes or Tara McMullen. I just love the new direction and format of her show. What works. It's so dynamic. There's so many juicy ingredients that go into every episode in the way of research and stories, and her own analysis and interviews on top of that were mixed in together in each episode. You can tell that she has crafted each episode with immense care, really seasoning it, getting it to have all the right ingredients. And I would imagine she and her team do a tremendous amount of work in advance. There's no way that episodes like that come together just riffing off the top of her head. With those mindset considerations in place, let's get into five strategies for reducing overwhelm when writing, AKA thinking.

Strategy number one. You've heard me say it a million times. Make sure you have an idea collection bucket. I mentioned Tiago Forte. He has a fantastic book called Building a Second Brain. He's a previous guest on this show. I use notion for this. I'll put a link in the show notes to the episode where I talk about my collection bucket. I've done loom walkthroughs. The bottom line is you need a catch all location. The reason I like notion is because it's where everything else in my business operates. In the past I used to use Evernote. Both of them have a web clipper so that you can directly clip articles into a database. In my case, I call my Idea Bucket synthesis because it's a reminder for me to synthesize what I'm learning and finding. But a good collection bucket will help you collect articles. You find interesting factoids, concepts you think of, personal stories and anecdotes from your day to day, profiles of other people that you find interesting. It's anything and everything that as you go about your days, you're a curiosity detective. You're looking for what sparks your interest. What intuitive hits do you get about what you're finding, and you put it in there. The importance of having an idea bucket is that you're not starting from scratch when it comes time to assemble a big idea. One of the most important elements of my synthesis or idea collection bucket database are labels or tags, technically speaking, for all the different topics that a given card might cover. So, for example, it can be anything from art, business, creativity, leadership, marketing. I also put tags for different principles that I've talked about before in free time or pivot like Escape velocity, Vicious cycle, Virtuous cycle, social media. I even have a tag called Fame Celebrity because I just find that fascinating. I have a tag called Exquisite Greatness for when I see something that I find so moving and inspiring. I have tags on Risk, Athletics, Decisions, Money, awareness, Society, Supply chain, believe it or Not, Systems, Schadenfreude, stress, New York City. That's usually personal stories I'm collecting, and so on with those tags. Then when I go to write something or record a podcast episode, I already have an idea bank of concepts, facts, profiles, resources that I might pull in and weave together in my own unique recipe of interesting ideas and materials and supporting kind of documentation. Because different people resonate with different things. Some people really love learning through stories. Some people love learning with lists and checklists. Some people love facts and statistics. You can combine all of that to create really rich content. Another important aspect of my collection bucket is a section called Content Production, and for any given idea or snippet or article that I clip, I can tag it. I can use a select, which means I only choose one at a time for either inbox. I haven't processed it yet. One of my two newsletters, Time well Spent or Pivot List. And for each one I have time well spent to add and time well spent added because I don't want to delete a card once I've added it to my newsletter. But I want to know. I've already shared this with my readers. I also have BFF to Add and BFF added. That's my private community for heart based business owners. And finally, podcast to add. Podcast added. So when I'm on the go and let's say I think of a concept or I put something together that I know could make a good solo episode, I will tag it podcast to add. And then from my entire collection, bucket of hundreds of cards by now I can create a view where I'm only looking at a list of potential podcast topics that I could talk about. By doing that on a regular basis while I'm on the go, it means that the day that I sit down to record, or even the day that I sit down to map out what the next four solo episodes might be, I'm not starting from scratch. I already have a menu that I can choose from.

The second strategy is give yourself a chance to brainstorm non linearly. If you do this on paper, you could do a mind map where you put your body of work, whatever the big theme that you're focused on at the moment, or if you're going to write a book, the big idea of the book, and then in a nonlinear manner, really figure out what are the key tenets of this idea or what are the main things that you want to cover. And the key thing here is you're letting your mind roam free. You are not trying to organize content by sitting in front of a computer and gasp having a Word document open. I know some people that brainstorm this way and this would drive me nuts to try to write anything in a linear fashion in a Word document or a Google Doc or even a notion page. Give yourself the opportunity to think and brainstorm freely, non linearly. I'll put in the notes a loom that I did on my book board. And there's a previous episode of this podcast as well. I wrote free time in a third of the time of my previous two books. Partly that's because it was my third go round. Partly it's because I was most inspired and excited by the idea. And partly it's because I was the most organized. Having done it before I knew what I needed. And the first thing that I needed was a nonlinear book board. What I mean by that is that in notion I set up a Kanban style board where I had the three main parts of the book as the columns of this Kanban board. So technically I had intro Mind Time team conclusion. Now you know that mindtime team that ultimately wasn't very actionable and it didn't describe a transformation journey. So that became later the Free Time, framework, align design, assign a more linear journey that I wanted to take readers through. But for the book board in the early days, I needed to just have a bunch of cards. What concepts? Every micro concept, not chapters of the book. Because I wasn't there yet, every micro concept got a little card. And then I would drag and drop the cards across the columns. Something like my text exchange with my friend about being at hooky headquarters, not being able to work or wanting to burn it all down, having a conversation with her about that. And so I might drag a card called burn it all down or over to the introduction, thinking, what if I kicked off the book with this? Or I've given the example before of a card like the floor is lava to convey working on process, not just in the tasks, especially when it comes to something like email. So the floor is lava becomes a card. I don't know if that's going to turn into a chapter. I just know that it's a metaphor. It's a concept that I want to flesh out a little bit more. So that's what's really helpful about a book board. And now, twice in the process of working on free time, I took things from my book board digitally, put them on index cards, moved index cards around a big dining room table, put it back into the book board in different order with somewhat different main headers, and then I did it again later in the process because I kept needing to almost make the process tangible. Taking something as big and complex as a book and seeing it on index cards, moving them around with my hands, really looking at it over the course of several days where I needed to get it out of the computer and make it more tactile.

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Strategy number three borrows from another culinary term, mise en place. So with mise en place, the idea is that professional chefs prepare their workstation in advance. They would never be having the restaurant be open. They're in the frenzy of the evening, working on all the dishes that everyone's ordered and have things be scattered or a mess. They put their bowls out, they get their workstation ready, they sharpen their knives, they have their washcloths. Everything is ready and organized at their workstation before they start. This goes back to the meal kit. When you sign up for a meal kit service, if it's not pre made meals, I am loving factor at the moment because you don't even have to do the work of assembling a meal kit. Put the link in the show notes. But if you are using something like Blue Apron or Hellofresh, some people like the assembly. So these services, they give you the bag with the ingredients and a recipe card. In a way, they are helping set up your mise en place. You might still need to chop things in advance. Like you could chop the onions, chop the carrots, chop the celery, put them in bowls in advance. That would be your mise en place. You can make sure you have all the right tools out the bowls you're going to need, the baking tray. Anything and everything that you can do in advance will make it so much easier when it comes time for assembly. The actual writing. So when it comes to writing and big ideas, the equivalent to mise en place, sure. Make sure your desk is clean, your office isn't overly cluttered, and when it comes to the ideas gather in proverbial bowls. Personal anecdotes, data and statistics, concepts, synthesis, your own thinking, certain pointers or checklists on how to the really tactical, practical things, stories from yourself and others, examples from other people. The more you can get of these little ingredients and put them in bowls, quote unquote, around your workstation, the easier the writing is going to be because you're preparing all the ingredients so that by the time you're going to sit down to write an essay or a chapter of the book or the outline of a podcast episode, you're pulling these things together. You're not having to come up with them from scratch. And that goes back to why the idea bucket is so important.

Strategy number four. Start with a pilot light. If we stick with our cooking metaphor, this is where you're at the oven. And let's say you have a gas stove. You turn the handle, click, click, click, Boom. You see the fire ignite for that burner on your stove. My friend mbs, I tell this story in free time. He really helped me reduce the overwhelm I felt when I was staring at free time. I had an outline, but I didn't really know where to start. And he said, let's both just commit to 100 words a day for 30 days. And he said to me, that's seven sentences. You can even do them when you're on the go via voice dictation on your phone. MBS in that moment helped me spark the pilot light. Seven sentences. I thought, that's nothing. I can write seven sentences. And so the example I gave of my friend saying, oh, I just. Sometimes I just want to burn it all down. I can write or even voice dictate seven sentences about that. And I did often do that when I was out with Ryder in the morning, we'd be playing Frisbee or up on a hill. At that time, I was picking up glass shards off of this one hill where I go walk him. And I had a lot of fun just thinking of seven sentences about any given concept. I gave the example earlier of how we bake is as important as what we make. Okay, well, Can I give seven sentences about that? Yes. 100 words. It's so tiny that it's manageable. And that tiny task really helps break the ice of having nothing to say or feeling that sense of writer's block or thinker's block. We can even give a bonus strategy, 4.5, which is accountability with a friend for this would be great. So MBS and I would send each other a green check mark emoji in Marco Polo every day once our writing was done. And Marco Polo allows you to just respond with more emojis. So it wasn't very cumbersome for us to check in with each other, but we had that extra accountability. So break your idea, your thinking down, give yourself the teeny tiny task of doing seven sentences, and now you really can ask ChatGPT to even do that for you. Then you're just correcting the bot's work instead of even your own. Or seven personal sentences. What ChatGPT can't do is speak from the heart, really connect with your capital T, truth, tell a story, be vulnerable. So you could also aim to get those seven sentences of really speaking from the heart about whatever the concept is. Why is this important to you? Why is this interesting to you? What's your counterintuitive or counter status quo take on this concept? Start there and then it will be so much easier to plug in data and statistics and examples and stories around that later on.

Fifth and final for now, if you're working on a book building on that tiny task idea, consider shorter chapters. I always find it intimidating and somewhat boring to try to follow typical business book format of 10 really robust, intricate, well researched, statistically significant chapters. That just bores me. It bores me as a reader and it overwhelms me as a writer. For free time, every single chapter was no more than 2,000 words. The goal that I was aiming for for most of them was a nice even balance of 1500 words. That's manageable. And even within those 1500 words, there might be a sidebar, there might be a bulleted list of key takeaways. And so if you really think about something that you're doing and you just flip the script on what is required, how can you break it down even smaller? Writing a book. All three of my books, I have written them in a nonlinear way, meaning I chose any random chapter, any random sidebar. I really thought of every chunk of the book as a single blog post. So I was only ever writing 500 to 1,000 words at a time. That's it. That's it. And that is something I know you can do. Of course, later you weave in transitions and you introduce things and then you conclude things. All of that can come later. But to get the meat of something down, consider that you only really need to write 500 to 1,000 words at a time, one blog post at a time. Every single one of my books I worked on kind of in the margins of my time, probably with free time, it was more my main focus every single day. I did that on purpose. I really cleared my schedule for many months in 2021, so I could give it my full focus and creative energy. But I remember with Pivot and life after college, I was really busy with my business and working at Google prior to that. So I would work on the book for 15 to 20 minutes a day. So if a word count isn't motivating to you, think about a time count that's really tiny. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Do 20 minutes a day. That's it. 20 minutes is something you can do. And especially if you don't judge the work, the first draft of anything, I don't have to tell you, we all know it's terrible. But the more thinking that you do in advance, the faster those 20 minutes will fly and the higher quality what will be that you get down in those 20 minutes because again, in those 20 minutes you really shouldn't be thinking. Do the thinking that morning with your coffee, like when you make your coffee or your tea in the morning. Figure out which micro essay you're gonna write and do all the thinking in advance. Pull the ingredients. Set up your workstation even in your mind so that when you sit down for your 20 minutes you're transcribing from your mind. You're not thinking from scratch.

Those are my five strategies. I would love to hear your tips for reducing overwhelm when writing or thinking about big ideas. To recap, number one, make sure you have an idea collection bucket. Number two create a nonlinear book or idea board. Number three, make sure to prepare your ingredients and your workstation, both physical and digital conceptual with musenplus. Number four, ignite your pilot light with a really tiny task like a hundred words. And number five break things down into smaller bits, whether smaller bits of time 20 minutes a day, or smaller writing or idea chunks 500 words at a time. I know you can do this. I would love to hear what follow up questions or strategies you have. You can always leave me a voice note@itsfreetime.com and again, if you want to check out the author toolkit, that's itsfreetime.com authors. Thanks so much for listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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