A supposedly productive thing I’ll never do again
Writing while groggy
According to the productivity illuminati on Medium, the best time for writing is while still groggy in the morning. I’ve got my tea brewing so according to this logic my creative output should summarily plummet with each delicious, awakening sip. It will sort of be like a reverse version of Flowers for Algernon in which my writing noticeably deteriorates over time.
Maybe there is something to the claim. As I contemplated writing, I made the Flowers connection in my mind but could not remember the title. As I started writing the sentence the name magically surfaced as if conjured by keystrokes.
My son plied me from the bed this morning after my wife had already departed for yoga. The enveloping fog and silence lended a cozy quietude to the morning. My son noticed me standing in the kitchen while eating his oatmeal and asked, “what doing, daddy.” I told him I’m just thinking and he replied that he was thinking about me. What a mensch.
He noticed that I wasn’t eating breakfast and inquired as to what I was eating. “Nothing,” I tried to explain to him. “Daddy is fasting today which means not eating. There are three meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner and I’m skipping the first two today.” Resigned to amused befuddlement, Edgar went back to eating his oatmeal. As I started making myself tea he piped up to request his own cup. I gladly obliged and now he’s sitting next to me watching YouTube on the iPad while sipping tea from a curly straw. I thought I would be annoyed by the YouTube videos penetrating the luscious silence but the warmth of having him sit contentedly next to me outweighs his choice of content.
While perusing Gretchen Rubin’s website last night I happened upon her advice for writers. Her main point was to focus on “what you want to say.” A simple but valuable point particularly as I ramble on here today like so many Charlies from so many Flowers.
While I’m brain dumping here I might as well share some other writing advice I absorbed from those selfsame productivity gurus. One author shared an apropos post on how he turns his journal into blog posts. He essentially uses a handwritten journal to write out his main ideas as bullet points. When he goes to compose a blog post he writes the title and section headers (including Conclusion) first.
Eschewing this advice, I nearly always write my title last. I find that I am more likely to devise a creative and appropriate title having now fully explored the subject. For a rambling journal entry such as this I truly have no idea what I am going to write other than perhaps the first paragraph. But I do like my practice of titling (nearly all) my journal entries as it operates as a sort of hashtag for identifying the general contents of a given post.
My initial reflection on writing while groggy is that I feel less focused yet perhaps less inhibited. Since I did not have a particular topic in mind this morning other than self-experimenting with “writing while groggy”, I meandered about. Not a bad thing and indeed a perfect use case for a journal. However, I do wonder how I would have fared had I focused my grogginess on a more demanding philosophical or analytical subject. That will have to wait until another day as I’m now well on my way through a second cup of Yerba Maté; returned to uncreative homeostasis.
