Start with literally anything not nothing
Okay. So here’s what happened. I had a blog post draft open in Notion for three weeks — literally a blinking cursor and a title. No idea what happened every time I opened it. Instant amnesia. My brain would just go “nope” and I’d scroll Twitter instead.
I saw someone mention the two-minute rule again. You’ve probably heard it: “If it takes less than 2 minutes, do it now.” But someone tweaked it for writing — start any project by doing something small for two minutes. Not to finish it, not to be perfect. Just… do something.
So I opened my mess of a draft and typed exactly what I was thinking: “No idea what to write but maybe if I leave this sentence here and pretend I care, words will happen.” It’s dumb. Doesn’t matter. But it un-stuck something. And now you’re reading this paragraph. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The key is to remove the pressure completely — not to WIN blogging, just to REACT. Because reacting is way easier than inventing from scratch. That’s something I’ve noticed again and again in automation too — triggering something is always easier than building a system from zero.
If you’re trying this right now, open your blog editor and add *one* ugly sentence. Start with “I don’t know if this post is worth it, but…” and watch what happens.
Use a real trigger or moment not an abstract topic
There’s this pattern I’ve noticed with posts that just won’t start — they’re ideas, not moments.
Like the post I titled “Improving Your Daily Productivity Using Shortcut Automations.” I had zero energy to write it. But yesterday, I missed a Zoom call because my Mac’s Focus Mode shortcut silently broke. THAT was energy. That was frustration and momentum and a real event I could write about *right now* while I still had feelings 😅
So I changed the title to “That one time my Zoom focus shortcut failed and I missed a call.” Boom — twenty minutes later, I had a few completely honest paragraphs written about:
– What the shortcut used to do
– How it silently stopped working after a macOS update
– Me yelling “WHY IS SLACK OPEN RIGHT NOW” to no one
– How I fixed it by force-remapping Focus to run a manual shell script instead
– A dumb-but-perfect fix: a loud countdown timer for Zoom days 🙂
If you’re stuck, skip the generic advice titles. Write what happened. Use the thing that just broke or confused you. If nothing broke yet, hang out with your own system for a few minutes — something *will* flicker.
Create a hot mess draft you never have to show anyone
This is probably the most important trick — I call it the parallel post method.
So. I open a completely separate blank note — not in my blog CMS, not in Notion, not anywhere with formatting or pressure. Just a plain markdown file in Obsidian, or Notes.app, or a dead simple Google Doc. Sometimes even iA Writer. Don’t care.
Then I do something you’re probably not supposed to do: I write everything in a total mess. Inconsistent tenses? Don’t care 🙂 Paragraphs that trail off mid-thought? Yes. Sentences that are full of parentheses (like this bit here) because I’m just reacting, not editing? All of it.
Once, I tried writing a post explaining how Airtable’s automations silently fail whenever a field input returns a null that maps *before* a required field — and for the life of me I couldn’t make it make sense in proper blog formatting. So instead, I opened a blank doc and just typed:
> “Ok so here’s what happened: the automation ran but since the linked record didn’t exist yet, it passed a blank record ID into the Find Record step, and that weirdly returns a success with no result?? But the next step tried to map a field from the nonexistent result and THUD. Just died. But the error message was basically ‘null.field is undefined’ or something generic.”
That paragraph — unedited, illogical, full of twitchy tech-speak — became the core of the first draft. Later, I restructured it for clarity, but the energy came from that loose brain-dump.
If you’re starting a post and the sparkling-perfect intro isn’t coming? Skip it. Open a junk doc and write straight from the frustration or glitch you just lived through. Forget order. Editorial guidelines can come later. Right now it’s just between you and the weird bug that won’t let go.
Write the one thing you wish someone had told you
I once spent three hours trying to figure out why OpenAI’s response in a Make.com webhook scenario kept returning undefined — only to finally uncover a little forum comment that said:
> “If your OpenAI request has a line break in the JSON body, the Content-Type header MUST explicitly be application/json. Otherwise Make sends it as form data and the result is undefined.”
That line saved me. And I thought, wow, why is THAT not in the docs?
This kind of moment — where something that felt like gaslighting turns out to have a real cause you finally find — is the best blog content. Every weirdly helpful Stack Overflow answer, every backroom Slack tip, every half-remembered Discord comment… those are gold.
So when I start a blog post with the two-minute rule, I usually go directly to that nerve: what do I wish existed when I was googling this?
It’s not always some profound thing. I wrote one post purely because I couldn’t remember how to sort a Notion database with timestamps *descending*, and the UI kept flipping back to ascending after every edit. The fix? Click once to sort, click again to reverse — but you have to manually ungroup first 😂
Final tip start where the reaction is not the result
Let me say this clearly: the button press that fails, the Zap that runs twice, the automation step that mysteriously doesn’t trigger until you edit and re-save without changing anything — that’s the story. That’s where posts come from.
Not from the triumphant automation you built. That’s boring. The pain that came before the fix? The rage-clicking? The moment you googled “zapier ‘value’ is undefined javascript code step” for the fourth time in a row? That’s where your post lives.
So often, I find myself rewriting intros to try and sound wise — but every time I just start with “So yeah, for some reason this step never ran,” things move faster.
If you still feel stuck: go into the automation tool or blog platform you’re using, switch to edit mode *even if you’re not ready to publish*, and write a single comment like:
> “Draft note: webhook fired but step 3 didn’t trigger unless I added a delay.”