I struggle with this. I think most people do at one time or another. It can take many forms. I’ve spent far too long choosing between two color settings on a display in the past for instance. Maybe someone has had a project car waiting for that new side panel for two years. Perhaps you’ve had a song written, but not “ready to share” since you were in high school.

The relevance to right now is that most often I don’t write down ideas for posting; to this blog or Our Agile Journey. The problem, as I tell it to myself, is that my thoughts aren’t fully formed yet. See, I rarely write an actual draft of anything. I often re-write parts of a post as I’m writing it. I may re-order things, cut them out completely and post them to a new post, or add new stuff to earlier thoughts. I don’t write a draft start to finish without editing followed by a couple rounds of editing to a final. Of course, that means I never actually write when my thoughts are fully formed, I just feel that way as I am able to complete the post.

The real problem then is I don’t want to write something down until I can finish it. I want to start a post and let it flow to the end. I don’t want to jot down a single sentence and come back to it later. Whether due lack of time or lack of direction I tend to avoid it until the whole thing can happen at once. It translates into my preferred style of playing video games as well. I’m a bit of a completionist.

Historically if there is a percent done counter on a game I struggle to move on until it makes it to 100. I’ve gotten better. Realities of available time (and talent depending on the game) have gotten me to accept getting the main story and possibly some side-stories. I no longer try to get all the multiple endings of any given game. I also struggle to play sessions of only a half hour or an hour. For example, if I allotted myself 3 hours a week to play games I would rather do it all at one go then half an hour a night most of the week. That may or may not be related.

Now I need to bring the ability to not always go 100% from gaming to writing. I need to learn to be ok writing a little bit down, taking a voice note, or cutting and pasting a headline and web address. That needs to be enough for me to expand the effort. If not, I fear I’ll never get ahead on the other blog, contribute to this one, or complete speeches for Toastmasters.