Sometimes You’ve Just Got to Do It

The tricky art of beginning things

Late in November 2023, I was in the UK to speak at a business conference, which is something I’m very fortunate to get invited to do on a regular basis.

One of my routines when I travel is to try and make good use of my time by also seeing if I can piggyback off the conferences I’m attending and also see if I can tee up a meeting with someone working in an area related to my PhD, or perhaps see if I can attend an event, presentation or talk being given in the location I’m going to be in. As it turned out, my visit to London allowed me to attend a couple of terrific events, including one excellent lecture in Oxford and lunch with a fantastic young scholar working on AI and moral agency. Absolutely perfect.

While waiting at the Oxford train station to return back to London, I just happened to receive an email from my primary PhD supervisor, who had forwarded an invitation to submit a paper to a publication that was seeking contributions from research students such as myself. I quickly reviewed the details and realised that I was right up against the deadline for submission, so I made the immediate decision to pass on it and I deleted the email. But, while eking the most out of a brief ray of sunshine hitting the platform on an otherwise quintessentially grey English day, something made me fish the email out of my deletions and review it again.

I decided to try something a bit wild and see what I could get written in the 90 or so minutes I had on that upcoming train trip back to London. So, as the train pulled in, I quickly found a seat and got busy. On my phone, no less. But, I figured that I just needed to trust what I had and get on with it. No mucking around or overthinking it. I had some ideas already a little formed in my head about the use of GenAI, and I just started pulling together a draft.

I wrote quickly. I did my best not to stop and edit myself all the way through. I figured the best approach here was to crank out the words all the way through, and then circle back to edit and refine later. And, strangely, as I’m doing this very minute on a flight over South America somewhere, I find that my writing experience on my phone with just my thumbs punching away is surprisingly productive and of a reasonable quality. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but it’s definitely been my consistent experience. I’ve often suspected that the form factor of the phone and the limitations on the typing speed actually means I’m creating at a speed that seems to work well for me in terms of meshing my thinking and output at a certain kind of synchronicity that works. Perhaps more on that another time.

As we pulled into Paddington Station, I reviewed what I’d managed to crank through in that short window of time, and I was quite pleased with the overall quality. It reinforced to me that you really can do some surprising things if you don’t overthink it too much and find focus and go.

Too often, we feel like we need just the right conditions before we can start. I need my computer or some particular keyboard, at this or that location, at this specific time of the day, with X number of hours to give to the task, etc., etc., etc. We create so many constraints and conditions on our creative process that finding that golden circumstance is largely impossible most days.

But, to the contrary, I have discovered that requiring as little as possible in terms of conditions to get going is the huge secret to my productivity. Yes, to be sure, sometimes it’s a very incremental type of productivity. It’s not what we aspire to when we go on a retreat or find that special hideaway to write for several hours without interruption. Rather, it’s just bits here and there that take a project forward, sometimes just 50 or 100 words at a time, sometimes on a plane, and sometimes standing in a grocery line.

But, it’s the kind of small consistent deposits that leverage compound interest to ensure that we get vastly more done than waiting for those perfect writing sessions which seem to be constantly thwarted by life.

This article written in the Oxford to London train has now undergone further editing and refinements, and will shortly be published. This experience has encouraged me to just go for it and not wait for the perfect time. If I’d waited for the perfect time, I can say with a high degree of confidence that this article would never have been written. It would still be just a good idea percolating in my brain, never to see the light of day on a page.

And so it is with my writing experience here on this platform. I've delayed and dithered, but here it is. The rough start that will continue and get better as we go.

PS: You can find the aforementioned article here. Enjoy!