When You Get Stuck, Think Small

Chunk it down, mis en place

Here is your mid-week extra, which comes out on Wednesdays or Thursdays, usually the latter. It’s my weekly process and/or craft oriented post for paid subscribers. You’ll find inspiration, motivation, and support, in my weekly Love Letter which comes out on Sundays.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Think big! We’re encouraged to think big and dream big constantly. And I’m all for it. Truly, I am. (I wouldn’t be in this crazy business if I weren’t.) But lately, I’ve been realizing how the opposite—thinking small—is so much more useful. There’s a couple of ways this is true.

Small Steps

First of all, you can think small on the way to big dreams, as steps along the path. After all, as the saying goes, the journey of a million miles starts with a single step. This is called microproductivity, or the domino theory, or even the puddle theory. And all of those are great and helpful, and I encourage you to adopt this approach. You don’t need to know anything about these theories, really. All you need to know is that small steps count. In our think big culture we often overlook that.

And yet, it’s so easy to overlook the small steps we take, to discount them. As an example, one day this week I had a weird morning, wherein my work was kind of all over the place. I completed some long-delayed emails, I did some organizing on my forever-cluttered desk, I talked a family member down off an emotional ledge, I found the notes I’d scribbled in my journal for this post and transferred them here, where they could be molded into an article. I read a short submission from a client. By lunchtime, I’d gotten stuff done, but it didn’t feel like it. Even as I crossed things off the list in my planner, I felt itchy and out of sorts. Which is when I needed to remind myself to look at all the things I’d crossed off my list. Which is my second point: give yourself credit for those small steps you have taken. Because, have I mentioned that they count? Those small steps are what take you to your dreams. They are the action equivalent of mindfulness.

Chunk It Down

But useful as that is to remember, it’s not the gist of what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to discuss how thinking small is beneficial to apply to the writing process itself. I rediscovered (because my writing life and teaching is a constant process or rediscovery) this during an early morning writing session this week.