The Grind is a Lie (#28)
Working when you should is better than working when you can
Some time ago, a client shared a revolutionary idea with me on a call. He’s a husband, a father, and a PM at a well-known media company, to name only a few roles. On any given day, he’s pulled in a dozen different directions.
So, I asked him how he manages to be productive in the midst of all the chaos. His answer surprised me.
He doesn’t try to be productive. He just lets it happen.
He’s accepted that there are times — maybe even days — when life simply doesn’t allow for productive work. Family, travel, and interruptions happen. On those days, forcing output almost always results in poor or even counterproductive results. Instead, he lets productivity come to him. If things quiet down later in the evening after the kids are asleep and he catches a second wind, he rides the gusts as far as they’ll take him. If he finds a quiet moment mid-day between meetings, he takes advantage of it.
He doesn’t create a context for productivity. He lets the context create the productivity.
The Problem with the Grind
Most of us in tech and SaaS industries live under the myth that productivity is a constant state we can summon at will. We schedule deep-work blocks, buy focus apps, and measure our worth by how much we produce before lunch.
But anyone who’s worked in documentation or product knows this: you can’t brute-force clarity. When you sit down to write in the wrong frame of mind — in chaos, distraction, or fatigue — the output might look like writing, but it isn’t thinking. The sentences are there, but the insight isn’t.
We grind because we’re afraid to stop. Yet the grind often gives us more words and fewer ideas. My client’s perception stood in stark contrast to this. He understood instinctively that productivity is a rhythm.
He recognized that forcing output ignores the natural cycles of attention and recovery that creative and analytical work require. The same truth applies to technical documentation. There are moments when your brain, your product, and your team’s feedback align.
Those are the moments when you “should” write, the windows when the work deserves your effort. The rest of the time, writing simply because you “can” often means producing text that will be rewritten tomorrow.
Defining Our Terms
Let’s name the distinction clearly:
Working when you can means using available time, regardless of readiness. It’s rooted in control and the idea that productivity can be summoned on demand.
Working when you should means aligning your effort with the moment’s potential. It’s rooted in wisdom and recognizing when the conditions support meaningful progress.
The first approach looks productive, but the second actually is.
Why This Matters in Documentation
Technical writing depends on rhythm. The best docs aren’t born from uninterrupted grind sessions but from cycles of gathering, reflection, and synthesis. You need moments of reading product specs, watching a demo, testing the workflow, and then letting your mind connect the dots.
The grind treats writing like an assembly line. But documentation is closer to design. It thrives in intervals of focused creation punctuated by rest, review, and revision. As writers, our goal isn’t to produce constantly but to produce consequentially.
In a study on mental fatigue and time structure, Meijman and Mulder found that how we organize our working hours directly shapes our cognitive performance. When work was arranged in continuous, unbroken blocks, subjects experienced faster onset of fatigue and lower quality of focus. But when the same workload was distributed across shorter cycles of effort and recovery, both accuracy and endurance improved significantly.
Their findings suggest that productivity isn’t just about how much time we spend working, but how that time breathes. The human mind performs best when work is structured rhythmically, not relentlessly. Effort and rest should alternate with intention.
How to Work When You Should
Here are a few practices to help tune your writing rhythm instead of fighting against it:
Track your natural peaks. Take note of when in the day your mind feels clearest. Schedule your hardest thinking tasks around your natural peaks rather than your calendar.
Distinguish busy time from deep time. Busy time checks boxes. Deep time changes outcomes. Protect your deep time by reducing context switching and Slack noise.
Use friction as feedback. When writing feels forced, stop! Go test the product, read an issue, or just walk away. The friction is information. It’s your brain telling you conditions aren’t ready.
Honor rest as part of the process. A rested writer is strategic. Rested attention yields cleaner drafts, fewer revisions, and more authentic tone.
Closing
When I ended that call with my client, I thought about how rare his approach was. He wasn’t lazy or undisciplined. He was discerning.
He had learned that productivity isn’t a faucet to be turned on so much as a tide to be ridden.
Good technical writing — and good living — requires that same discernment.
Work when the tide comes in, and wait when it goes out. Because ultimately, the grind is a lie. Only rhythm is real.