Can I Write Something Worthwhile in Ten Minutes?





Tyler Cowen recommends writing daily as a means of improving one's writing and memory, not to mention the rewards of being a good a prolific writer. I'm convinced - in fact I've tried daily writing for 20 minutes. That failed, and now with the birth of our second child, I'm skeptical that a recommitment to that effort will succeed.

However, what if I write for only 10 minutes daily? Can I say something worthwhile in only 10 minutes? That is my current challenge.

The frustration of writing, for me, is that the final product is rarely a clear representation of my thoughts. In conversation I feel as though I can pretty easily and succinctly articulate my ideas. Yet, even when writing down ideas that I have refined over the course of several conversations, I find it takes an exceedingly long time, with several revisions, to get down anything close to what I have in mind.

And, with a thud, comes the point: that's the value of writing, to realize that my thinking is far less clear and concise as I think. What makes thinking shoddy is that I deceive myself, not realizing that my own mind is papering over gaps and inconsistencies. Writing reveals some of these gaps, forcing revisions and reconsiderations.

This process usually engenders doubts and confusion, and when I'm done I find I'm usually less convinced about the merits of my idea. I suspect this is why I rarely finish a piece of writing - as I realize that my thinking about the topic is unclear, as time drags on (what seemed to be a quick write up is now taking 5x the time), and as doubts surface, I get disappointed, uninspired, and I quit.

Popper would say that quitting is abandoning the great value of writing - it's the critical phase of knowledge generation! Writing is key not only to preserving knowledge, but more importantly to knowledge generation through error correction.

My 10 minute timer has sounded. I hope this was worthwhile. I wonder what the minimum amount of time writing can be worthwhile? Can you say something in 5 minutes? Maybe Twitter is the lower bound? Maybe it's too low and that's what it sucks?

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