I write for a living — blog posts, newsletters, documentation, the works. On a good week that's about 3,000 words. On a bad week it's the same 3,000 words, except I've rewritten the opening paragraph seven times and my coffee intake has doubled.
The problem wasn't writer's block. It was structure paralysis. I'd have all the ideas floating around in my head, but putting them into a linear sequence felt like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Every time I tried to write an outline in a text document, I'd end up with a bullet list that looked like a shopping list — flat, lifeless, impossible to tell what's important and what's not.
Then I stumbled into something that changed the game: mind mapping for outlines.