Finding the time to conclude

I've often heard that the thought most at the top of your mind is the one that shows up when you're in the shower. Or on your commute to work. Or while exercising alone. Or even sometimes when sitting on an airplane.  

While it's clear that moments when you are beside yourself are the moments that allow  the brain to air out, I've found that conclusions drawn from those thoughts are mostly inward looking and personal.

Current events? The cutting edge of whatever is breaking in your industry? Developing a well crafted response to the op-ed in yesterday's New York Times? Putting our stakes in these areas involves similar time, but it's much more difficult to turn nubs of ideas into fully blown out opinions and arguments. This kind of thinking, and more importantly, drawing some kind of conclusion, involves a proactive and patient manipulation of words. It's hard to say I can get this from the tea tree oil in my shampoo. 

In an attempt to try and match all the time I spend consuming information, I'm going to attempt to dedicate more time towards producing conclusions (it's very obvious that in college, or any kind of schooling, class assignments and papers often provide insurance against this kind of passive thinking).

Where do you find your time to conclude? 

Talker's Block

I've been blogging here for nearly a year with various peaks and valleys of frequency.  

The content of these writings? A mixture of one part self reflection and one part shares of other internet musings (videos, other blogs, snippets).  At start, I was posting regularly at least once a week if not twice. The longest I've gone between posts is two months.

The cause for these less frequent postings is likely because of time and writer's block. 

But in a recent book talk for Mitch Joel's Ctrl Alt Delete, Seth Godin thwarted the entire notion of writer's block by noting that "you can always just write how you talk." The term "writer's block" itself was only first coined in 1947 by Edmund Bergler. And considering that the vast majority of writing is non-fiction based (bloggers, personal journals, I guess you could also lump in Facebook messages and posts here), Godin is probably right. For the sole purpose of getting the first draft or the first arrangement of words out, it's helpful to simply speak on the page. 

No one wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves "You know what? Today, I think I have talker's block."