Fake Blog Posts as a Problem Solving Device

post by silentbob · 2024-08-31T09:22:54.513Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

    When struggling with some difficult problem X, I often find it helpful to write a blog post titled “How I Solved X” or “How I Managed to Overcome X” from a hypothetical future perspective, explaining the path from my current situation to the solution.
  Why?
  Some Examples
  Next Steps
None
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This is a very brief post about a simple problem solving strategy I sometimes find useful, that may be worth trying for people who have never done it.

This is the strategy:

When struggling with some difficult problem X, I often find it helpful to write a blog post titled “How I Solved X” or “How I Managed to Overcome X” from a hypothetical future perspective, explaining the path from my current situation to the solution.

It’s not necessary to ever publish this writing or show it to anyone, but I still try to at least entertain the possibility that this might happen.

Naturally it makes sense to avoid putting too much effort in the quality of the writing itself, and rather focus on the content.

Illustration of a disguised person writing a fake blog post
Dressing up like a burglar is optional

Why?

This approach has a lot of overlap with e.g. journaling, pair debugging or coaching conversations. Some of the benefits are:

Some Examples

Here are some things I already have or eventually might write such a fake blog post about:

Often I don’t actually finish these posts, but go through a couple of quick writing sessions and find that already sufficient to identify a decent solution and get myself unstuck enough to actually implement it.

Next Steps

If this sounds like the kind of thing that might potentially work for you and you've never tried it before, I’d suggest to now spend two minutes and do the following:

  1. Think of a problem you're facing that would be a good candidate to write a fake blog post about
  2. Create a google doc or similar, with the corresponding title
  3. Write at least the first two sentences, maybe schedule a 10 minute session later on to do continue
  4. If you like, set a reminder to return to this post in the future and share your experience

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