So I’ve been playing a lot Team Fight Tactics. It’s really fun. And much harder to learn than you’d expect, if you’re someone who has never played League of Legends, or really any games like that. Someone like me.
Anyway, I’ve been having a great time learning. I’m still real bad at it, but I understand it well enough to enjoy myself a lot. Maybe too much. To the point that I want to play all the time.
Thankfully, I still have some modicum of self-control, so the game hasn’t gotten in the way of any of the really critical stuff I need to do every day. I’m not in any danger of getting fired or neglecting my family.
But writing has taken a hit.
Here’s the truth: writing is the hardest thing I do. It’s a high-focus activity, and it demands a truly enormous AMOUNT of decision-making, which is itself mentally exhausting. And then, of course, I’ve got all these neuroses.
So it’s the first and most common thing I blow off. I’m working on a new book, which I will say nothing about except for that at my current pace, I will never finish it.
While I was journaling this morning (which has become a much less fraught activity for me), I decided to break down the steps that it takes to get started writing, versus the steps it takes to get started playing a round of TFT.
Surprise! It turns out there are more, and more complicated, steps to get started writing than there are on the way to gaming.
Here’s my plan: practice those steps. To build the habit of writing, I need to first build the habit of just getting started. Which is why my current goal for working on the book I’m writing is to write one sentence a day. The focus is the process of getting started. Once that’s automatic, I’ll be more ambitious. Maybe go for a whole paragraph.