Lately I set a 12-minute timer and make three deliberately bad versions before I touch polish, and it’s been cracking my 3 p.m. wall all week. If you’ve been stuck, what tiny constraint or timebox reliably flips you from freeze to flow?
I run a 3-minute “no backspace” sprint in a scratch doc, then 9 minutes keeping one line to build around — like panning for gold without tweezers. @benjamin92’s nudge made me add a constraint each round (e.g., “only verbs” or “no adjectives”) to keep it playful. If it’s research-heavy, I swap the sprint for a quick 10-fact dump first.
I do a 10-minute voice memo rant, then 2 minutes skimming the auto-transcript to pull three bullet seeds — tricks my brain into thinking it’s “just talking”. If the room’s too loud, I swap it for 12 minutes of tiny thumbnails on sticky notes instead, but the voice pass breaks perfectionism fastest, @benjamin92.