I had a huge insight today regarding the day job. Honestly, I probably should have figured this out before now. But late or not, this has given me a lot to think about.

For the day job, I do technical writing. What I just realized is that I spend 80% of my day job in critical voice (as opposed to creative voice, which is where I try to do all my writing from.)

This realization led to several “ah ha!” moments for me:

–I’ve always been jealous of people who can write during their lunch hour. I can’t. I can never start writing immediately after work. It takes me a while to change gears. I finally understand why: it takes me a while to drive out that critical voice and get back into creative voice.

–Only about 80% of my job is critical voice. About 20% is actually in creative voice, or something akin to it. It’s one of the reasons why I can produce more documentation than most technical writers: I can slip into something like creative voice and just spew information really quickly once I understand it.

–I do my best technical writing during the afternoon, while I do my best creative writing in the morning or late at night. Again, all about the critical voice, which is much stronger when I’m awake (mid-afternoon) than either the mornings or evenings.

–With the new position, which I’m transitioning to in mid-August, I’ll be using my creative voice much more often, and much less critical voice. I’m assuming that exercising my creative voice, and living there more, will strengthen it.

I’m sure I’ll have more realizations as I think on this more. It was a really nice clarification for me, some insight into how I work.