The Flow can help prevent the cognitive burden of starting a writing project with a blank page
A naive writing process begins with a rough inkling about what one wants to write and a blank page. Progress from this point requires an enormous amount of activation energy and cognitive effort: there’s nothing external, so you must juggle all of the piece-to-be in your head. This is in stark contrast with non-forcing and thus incompatible with ☯️ The Flow. By contrast, if you’ve already written lots of concept-oriented ☀️ Main-Sequence Notes around the topic (as you would using ☯️ The Flow), your task is more like editing than composition. You can make an outline by shuffling the note titles, write notes on any missing material, and edit them together into a narrative.
In fact, because you can create speculative outlines while writing notes, you might find that the first of these steps are already accomplished, too. And writing each note is not hard: Main-Sequence Notes permit a smooth incremental progress in writing. Instead of having a task like “write an outline of the first chapter,” you have a task like “find notes which seem relevant.” Each step feels doable.
References
- Matushak, Andy. Andy’s Notes: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Executable_strategy_for_writing.