Zoom in, Zoom Out, Zoom in to Win
TL;DR To keep from getting overwhelmed, maintain your bearings and focus on one thing at a time and strategically ignore the rest.
Brought to you by popcorn and nutritional yeast. (It’s what’s for dinner.)
To avoid getting overwhelmed by a book, I lean on the Table of Contents, which I obsessively refresh after I work on a section or chapter, checking the subheads to see if the sequencing still makes sense or if something needs to move, even temporarily, because it’s keeping me from clearly seeing how the book is flowing.
Zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, zoom back in, paying attention only to the section I’m working on. Zoom out. Writing the connective tissue happens later. I need to get the concepts down and sequenced properly for the reader first. Drive all the way through the book without this zooming behavior at your peril. You need to maintain your bearings because it’s really easy to get lost in the weeds as the book grows.
Another thing to know is that as you get more words on the page the stuff that was written at the beginning of the project might not fit anymore or will need adjustment. It’s really important to strategically ignore that stuff until the big pieces are in place and here’s why.
Today, while working on a client’s book, I got hyper focused on some blocks of text that need work. Naturally, it was at the end of the day when my executive function was on fumes. Enter cognitive dissonance: the overwhelming urge to fix it right now combined with insufficient brain cells to do so.
The best thing to do in that situation is to put the document away and go back in and decide what to do with it first thing in the morning when I am fresh. And so that’s what I did.
I’ll figure it out. In fact, the challenge of figuring this stuff out is exactly why I love this work so much!
However, I will say I love it a lot more at 8am than I do at 5pm, that is for sure.
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