3 Tricks to Overcome Writer's Block

When you’re writing, you’re often doing many things at once:

Sometimes your brain deadlocks—​not in what material needs to be conveyed, but in how to convey it or the order in which to write.

Try reducing the amount of things you’re simultaneously doing by just writing whatever bullet point notes come to mind. Write down what you think people need to know, in a way meant to be quick and not necessarily organized.

Here’s a sample from this post, before I started writing it in earnest:

When you feel enough momentum to write fuller statements and sections, stop the bullet points and get to that writing! Don’t feel you need to finish your bullets—​they’re serving their purpose if they’re getting you to produce content. Similarly, you don’t need to write content based on what you captured in your bullets. You’ll see I didn’t in this post.

On particularly tough pieces (for me, always writing my own performance reviews), I’ll end up doing this multiple times, always going back to bullets when I get stuck.

And sometimes the bullet points technique doesn’t work! If you’re looking at a blank page for what feels like an eternity—​maybe an hour, maybe days or weeks—​stop trying to write whatever you’re writing. Just move on. Figure out the next thing you plan to write, and skip to that.

When I skip something in the same document, like deciding that I just can’t write a section at the moment, I’ll make a comment in the doc like:

Or if I feel the need to vent a little in a draft:

Just make sure you mark your skips in a way that keeps you from unintentionally publishing them, or sharing them with too wide an audience!

If I’m skipping one doc and moving to another one, I’ll make a similar comment at wherever I paused in that doc:

I usually get back to the part I skipped after building up some momentum and getting productive brain chemistry in order. But sometimes, I discover that the reason I struggled to write the piece is it wasn’t actually the right information or topic for my audience. By moving to something else, I stopped obsessing over the inability to write something I felt I should have been able to write, and examined it for whether it was genuinely useful.

For those not familiar, Pomodoro is a productivity method where you break work into 25-minute increments, followed by 5-minute breaks. There’s a little more to it, but that’s the gist.

Pomodoro doesn’t really work well for my mindset as an everyday tool, but when I’m struggling to write or do some other thought-intensive task, I try doing three pomodoros in a row. Personally, 90 minutes is about all the time I can handle trying something mentally exhausting before I need a more substantial break or shift in focus.

An analogy from my physical therapy sessions: I have some muscles in my back that love to seize up. One of my specialists had me use a tool to reach around and press hard into those muscles. At first, the muscle groups resisted, but after a couple of minutes of focused pressure, they gave in and started to relax and work with me. Sometimes my brain is like that as well, if I stare at a page long enough and don’t allow myself a distraction.

And of course, you can use this time management technique in conjunction with the other tips to try to get your brain out of a deadlock.

You don’t have to wait until you’re stuck to integrate tips like these. In fact, they’re easier to remember if you do them often—​though not necessarily all the time. Can you find three times this week you could remind yourself to try these techniques?

If any of these work for you, or you have some other tried-and-true ways you handle the struggle, feel free to reach out through the #blog-comments channel in our Slack workspace!