Knowledge work can be divided into two stages:
- Planning: the process of making what is vague clear
- Execution: the process of carrying out what you planned
The latter, execution, is easy. The former, planning, is the headache. In knowledge work, "I'm stuck" means something is still vague. In other words, something hasn't been clarified yet. That's why you can't act and end up stuck.
Typing out the entire national anthem four times would be easy. Plenty of people would probably do it for 5,000 won. (Better than a delivery side gig!) But if you asked them to write a blog post of around 1,000 characters, the number of takers would drop sharply. Typing the whole anthem four times comes to about 1,200 characters. So why do we avoid writing a blog post even though it takes fewer keystrokes?
The reason is that blog writing is an unclear task. With the anthem, it's perfectly clear what you have to do. All that's left is the execution: typing. Blog writing, on the other hand, requires a lot of work to clarify vague things, like choosing a topic and shaping sentences.
That's why writing is bound to be good training for clarifying your thinking. Writing starts from a state where every sentence and every word is unclear. You keep turning the unclear into the clear, so your skill at clarifying can't help but grow.