Tiny habit for image streaming leads to faster writing

I got lucky with a recent habit change. Today, after feeling bad about my lack of progress with my writing, and after mild desperation caused me to reread the checklist for creating a new tiny habit in the appendix of Tiny Habits, I decided to integrate a tiny image-streaming habit in my writing workflow: “After no inspiration for five seconds, I will ‘search the darkness’ for three seconds”.

What does search the darkness mean? When I close my eyes, I see mostly darkness, a sort of aphantasia… until I look hard enough. Like a TV that sparks images every few seconds, I get meaningful images. They’re not crystal clear and HD, but I get more meaningful low-def images in my subconscious than I do in my high-def reality.

I’m not an “open-minded” person, and I’m certainly not visual, so more than this will exhaust me. But because I understand the tiny habits process, at least I can capitalize on some of the benefits that a visual, open-minded person would receive, i.e. the benefits of creativity and imagination.

After rehearsing and celebrating this, I started doing it more. The paragraph flowed without inner resistance. I started getting through the draft, spit, and reorder in sub-forty-five instead of an hour-plus. I started to understand what I read faster. The quality of the writing went up. The speed at which I wrote improved. We’ll see how this benefits me going forward, but I’m a huge fan of tiny habit change after this.