Writing Struggles, Restructuring, and Finger Exercises by Neil McGowan
I’ve recently finished a deliberate break from writing. Not just the act of putting words on paper, but editing and tweaking, even thinking about it in any great depth. The Christmas period helped (I managed to get away to Yorkshire for five days, and deliberately didn’t take a laptop or even a pen with me). Never mind Zoom fatigue (or in my case, Teams (which is, shall we say, not the slickest piece of software I’ve ever used), I had screen fatigue. The thought of turning on my laptop after a full day of staring at a screen was demotivating to say the least. Add to that my job involves teaching all levels of clinicians and their admin staff how to use various digital systems, using both Teams and another piece of software (because Teams won’t do everything we need) and my digital energy levels were non-existent by the time I finished. For the past few months, I’ve ploughed on, trying alternatives such as writing by hand (quite satisfying but slow, and still needed ...