Howdy folks 🤠how are you today?
Quick question: Am I the only one who feels a sudden rush when you're about to complete a goal? I mean, you suddenly start feeling this sense of urgency and anticipation when you know you are almost getting to the end of your goal but at the same time, it looks so far away. That's what I have been feeling these past couple of days; I am almost getting to the end of the course I'm taking with Harvard university and now I'm pushing myself even harder than before.
That's my grade book and I have just 4 weeks left before the end. The last week is actually for my final project, so technically I have 3 weeks of lectures left. I have been rushing through the lectures in a bid to quickly get to the end but maybe I feel I'm just rushing because I can now easily understand the topics. Unlike the first few weeks that was very confusing, things are getting better now.
I spent several hours today watching the lecture video for the current week and I completed it around 6:30 pm (which is very unusual). I quickly interacted for a while on readcash and hive, then I settled down to start writing my article, and that was when I realized I haven't figured out what to write for today. Do you come up with a topic when it's time to write or you think about it before then?
I do the latter; I think about a topic during the day or rather; a topic finds me 😆 how does a topic find me? It happens when I spend a lot of time on nairaland or Twitter. I might just come across an argument on nairaland or a tweet on Twitter and it instantly triggers a topic that I quickly jot down. Then once it's time for me to write, there's already a topic to write on.
One thing I have realized is that it's easier to write a topic that comes freely than to write about one I search for. And what I mean by search for is that if maybe at the end of the day I haven't gotten a topic to write on and I am quickly running out of time, I make use of an online random word generator. I just set the word type to Noun and then set the number of words to 10, click on the generate button, and voila!
I can already think of about 3 topics from those list of words using "priority", "attention" and "excitement" 😆 I should probably add them to my note. I was at that stage today where I didn't come across any great topic online (mostly because I spent all day watching coding lectures) and I just kept thinking; "I have hit writer's block" but I immediately told myself that I'm just lying because I have a couple of topics saved in my draft and I can easily make more, so what's now the problem? Laziness?
It might be laziness but there's a thin line separating laziness and tiredness. We are all humans and it's okay to feel tired after a while. A lot of people think tiredness can only be physical but it can be mental as well, you can get mental exhaustion if you overwork your brain. I initially told myself that I was just being lazy about writing an article today but on second thought it might just be tiredness, So I did a quick rundown of everything I did today.
First of all, I didn't fetch water today so I had more time for other things. I started with writing an article for hive which took me about 2 hours, I got done around 11 Am and took my breakfast. I quickly engaged on hive and readcash until 12 pm, and that was when I started watching the current week's lecture video for the online course I'm taking.
The video is just 2 hours 30 minutes long but it took me over 6 hours to complete 😆 and that is because I was taking notes and I also took short breaks in between. So, looking at those activities (especially the coding lectures!), I can clearly understand why I couldn't find the strength to cook up an article and I started blaming it on writer's block.
I could've just taken today off and not published an article but I made a goal to publish every day at the beginning of this month and I don't plan on breaking it now that the month is almost over, it will be a shame if that actually happens. So, sometimes you might not really be suffering from writer's block but because you don't want to seem like you're lazy, you blame it all on writer's block but in reality, you're just mentally exhausted, and that's okay, you're human after all.
Thanks for reading 💖💖💖
Tuesday August 30, 2022
It's good to see that you are sticking to your plan of a post daily. Hahahaha the way you select topics randomly made me laugh hahahaha. That's one interesting approach that I've never tried. Topics come naturally to me and I might have an idea of 4-5 topics in a day and I would just get them set in my notes. I save a lot of drafts for rainy days that's why I don't usually have writer's block. Never had it... If I need to come up with something, poetry comes naturally to me and love is my favourite go to topic. I spend time on Twitter too. Twitter is a good place to know what to write on because we have weird people naturally on Twitter.