The pace of writing

Recently I’ve begun to realize that cognitive overload is caused by our experience of time, not space.

The overwhelm of cognitive overload is usually pictured as an overflow. The brain is a container and we’ve overfilled it with too much information.

But really, we deal with challenges all the time where the complexity of the task outstrips our capability. I once built a 3D printer from a kit with 100’s of parts. It took several days to work through all of the instructions. It was one of the most frustrating, tedious tasks I ever attempted, but I stayed focused and, once assembled, it worked perfectly.

Overwhelm is felt when the pace doesn’t match what you expect. A comedian experiences silence much like a writer experiences the blank page. The moment is not what feels intolerable. It’s the momentum. A confident comedian is comfortable waiting for the punchline to land. A confident writer doesn’t find the struggle with an opening paragraph intolerable.

Of course, the misfit between complexity of the task and capability does make the job harder and slows down progress.

But the error that overwhelms us is the difference between expectation and the less-than-stellar performance as a rate of change. We’re trying to catch the ball but we can tell it’s going to fly beyond our reach.