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
Of these, execution is the easy part. The planning stage is the headache. When you're "stuck" in knowledge work, it 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 about 1,000 characters, the number of takers would plummet. Typing the whole anthem four times comes to roughly 1,200 characters. So even though it involves fewer keystrokes, why do we shy away from blog writing more?
The reason is that blog writing is an unclear task. With typing out the anthem, it's perfectly clear what you have to do. Only the execution is left, which is just typing. Blog writing, on the other hand, requires a lot of work to clarify unclear things, like choosing a topic and shaping sentences.
That's why writing can't help but be good training for clarifying your thinking. Writing begins from a state where every sentence and every word is unclear. Since you keep turning things that are entirely unclear into things that are clear, your skill at clarifying is bound to grow.