More often then not I find myself browsing through an infinite amount of open tabs in my browser, looking for that one where the information actually is. Reading an article ends up adding five or six of them to the collection. Participating in a call at work adds another three or four with links shared for later reading. Multiple windows start to pop up when there isn’t enough space in the current one. All that stays around for days, even weeks, without ever being read. Without ever being finished. Many hanging threads, hanging only by the hope that one day motivation will dawn on me and I’ll finally read that documentation page that I don’t even know why it’s open anymore.
If, and I stress, if the pattern stayed with browser tabs, I wouldn’t think much of it. But when I switch off from work and move to other personal activities and hobbies, I very quickly find myself surrounded by unfinished things. Article ideas composed only of a title, a momentary inspiration crystallized for later expansion. Video and online course ideas composed only of a tiny outline, only to be forgotten as tomorrow another idea takes their throne. So many unfinished activities, so many undernourished ideas.
The main reasoning for this behavior is the “the idea must be captured now and later on it can be expanded” fallacy. A fallacy, yes, because I never get to the “expanding” part, I’m always busy capturing. Capturing ideas is quick, our minds are full of them. Expanding them is hard work, and not always rewarding. So very often I find that dedicating time to a single activity quickly becomes repetitive and not as exciting as the promise in my imperfect imagination was. The details of making mistakes, of not having enough background knowledge to hold a convincing argument, of just running out of ideas are left out by my sneaky brain. That’s how the brain works, after all: it abstracts details and it fails to create a realistic picture of how a certain mental model will later be translated into reality. We can all visualize a 5-Dollar (or Euro, or whatever the currency of our countries is) bill to perfection in our minds; it’s only when we try to draw them in reality that we realize how much our brain has left out, how many gaps and details were left unfilled.
Not spending time to work on these ideas prevents me from entering this ambiguous, sometimes discouraging territory. It protects me from disappointment through an elaborate thought process and addiction to filling rows in my tables of ideas only so that I can tap myself on the back and convince myself that I am productive. This is not how I want my life to be. I’m tired of just conceptualizing promises to myself, of only writing promises of work that will never be finished. I’m tired of opening tabs, never to read them.
The Nemo Writer 