Recently our house hit a wall.
Nothing dramatic. Just the quiet kind of tension that builds when everyone is tired, stuck, and trying too hard. My son was staring at a blank page, frustrated by a writing assignment. I was hovering between helping and worrying. My husband was pacing around unfinished chores. The room felt heavy — like everyone was carrying a private mental knot.
Instead of pushing harder, we did something strange.
We set a 10-minute timer and agreed to write without fixing anything.
No editing.
No rereading.
Stop mid-sentence if the timer ends.
Walk away.
Just write.
I’d been reading about expressive writing and emotional clarity for a while — the simple idea that when thoughts move from your head to the page, the mind gets lighter and calmer. (HBR has written about this in different ways, from writing as a tool for processing to the power of naming emotions.) But we didn’t talk about theory that day. We just tried it.
And something unexpected happened.
The moment it clicked
My son chose a tiny moment and zoomed in on it:
“As I entered the Gong Cha boba tea store, something caught my eye: the digital kiosk. … I then press my frequent order: brown sugar milk tea, double boba pearls, no ice, 30% brown sugar; my fingers seem to press away like I have done this a dozen times—probably because I have.”
It was funny, specific, and completely alive. The tension that had been sitting in the room softened instantly. He wasn’t blocked anymore — he was narrating the world.
My husband went in the opposite direction. He wrote chaos on purpose:
“Socks on the floor, socks on dogs.
…
The socks that never find the perfect match
…
When is Aida coming to our aid huh? And fixing all this mess?”
We laughed out loud. Not polite chuckles — the real kind. The messy laundry stopped being a problem and became material.
That’s when I understood what the exercise was really doing.
It wasn’t about writing.
It was about permission.
Permission to be imperfect. Permission to notice. Permission to say the quiet things out loud without consequence — and let the pressure leave the room.
The prompts we used (simple and fast)
Set a timer for 5–10 minutes. Write fast, don’t reread, don’t fix.
- Right Now Snapshot — describe what’s happening around you using your senses.
- Unsent Message — start with “I’ve never said this out loud, but…”
- Tiny Moment, Big Zoom — pick 30 seconds from your day and write it like it matters.
- The Bad Version (On Purpose) — write something deliberately terrible.
- One Question, No Answers — write around a question without resolving it.
It mirrored the analysis paralysis I sometimes slip into at work with my colleagues — all of us circling the perfect first version. Progress usually begins when we allow an imperfect one to exist, and trust that we can iterate later.
A full 10-minute piece, unedited
For the final prompt — “One question, no answers” — I wrote without stopping and didn’t touch a single word afterward. No grammar fixes. No restructuring. Just the timer and the page.
I later realized I completely missed the intent of the prompt — but I kept writing, which is kind of the point.
Here is one complete piece exactly as it came out:
Trip to Aruba
We are packing to go to Aruba in winter. It’s a process. I started it 2 weeks before the trip. I started looking at the weather in both New Jersey and Aruba. It is hard to predict the weather 14 days in advance. I am not sure if it’s going to be snowing. Should I pack the light jacket which is easy to then shove into our personal bag or should I pack a thicker one, which I won’t be able to put in any bag, but shove it into the overhead cabin…
Now there are 10 more days left for the trip. The weather shows that the weather is warmer than average on the day we are leaving. But the weather on the day we are returning is still unclear. So what should we pack? If I pack the lighter jacket, it is going to be easier, and we should be fine with the current weather prediction. But we still don’t know about the day we are returning and what the weather will look like. What if it snows on the day we return. What if the taxi that we hired doesn’t show up…
5 days left before the trip. We now know the weather with some certainty on the day we are leaving and on the day we are coming back. It is going to be warmer on the day we leave, and snow on the day we return, So it looks like we will need a thick jacket for the day we return to wait for the taxi that’s going to show up late..
1 day before the trip. That Christmas party with friends was so much fun. It was so much fun playing white elephants and secret santa. Look at the mess in the kitchen. Let me clean it up. Should I get the bag in the basement to pack the thick jacket when I go to throw away the trash..
1 hour before the cab to the airport arrives. Kids, just throw something into the bag, and wear that jacket on the floor.. We don’t want to miss the flight..