Don't know what to write about (Cannot focus)

Feeling stuck? You brain is blocked. You're trapped. Total confusion!

Just relax and let yourself do whatever you feel like doing at that very moment of stuckness. It is okay and besides, whatever other activity you take on yourself will just further stimulate your creativity.

You can:

• Doodle on the working paper
• Do some serious painting
• Play video games
• Watch a movie
• Do sudoku
• Solve the cross-word puzzles
• Scroll through an endless Facebook posts column
• Wash the dishes
• Iron
• Sing karaoke
• Filter some selfies of yours so they can look retro
• Take a walk
• Take a nap
• Bake a cake 
• Fix the closet
• Water those plants that are almost dying in the corner

Just do whatever. Let yourself be free from the restraints of the form. Once you have satisfied your carefreeness, the desire for writing will come back to you naturally and you'll be even more inspired to do your work.

Do the obvious:

•  Turn off everything you are so addicted to that is constantly distracting you (your phone, your internet, in case you do not need it for your research)
• Clean up the mess on your table so you won't be distracted by (it can disturb you and confuse you, however strange that sounds)
• Tell yourself that 3-4 hours of writing are a must for the day
• Write when everyone is sleeping or at least when you know you're safe from the interruptions
• Be alone with yourself (that's how you focus better and are more free to let your thoughts take over)

It is the same with food. You can eat more than just three or five times a day, but make sure that those intakes are nutritive to your health. The same goes for the concentration.

You don't have to glue yourself to the chair all day long. You can let the writing process be as short as writing a mere thought, but make sure that when you sit down, you should fill up that time with all the focus, creativity and skill you have.

What you can leave for later should be the proofreading.

Give yourself a goal and involve other people who will fall with you if you fail. That will keep you occupied to finish your work properly.

To make it easier, here's an example:

• Aim to write 2 pages a day
• Get your friends to sponsor you for charity
• If you fail, everything fails, your friends look at you as a nontrustworthy, and you feel extremely bad
• As a result, you work harder!

Peer pressure and social pressure can be both positive and negative. But, sometimes, negative pressure can trigger more positive outcomes than is generally accepted.

A slight modification in your writing location (or position) can get your writing flowing again.

Some inspiration where you may go instead:

• Your toilet sit! :)
• On the bench
• While playing chess with the elderly
• In the middle of the student protest
• Under your bed
• In the bath
• Under the rain
• In an open lecture or class

Ways and possibilities are many, you just have to be bold enough to try them out all, or at least the ones most enticing to you. Remember:

Change can be beneficial, even if the effect is temporary.

Maybe you have just been chronically exhausted a couple of days in a row, or on this particular day. So if nothing else helps:

• Coffeine overdose,
• Forcing yourself to write, or
• Getting some fresh air before going back to work,

you are definitely pushing yourself to stay awake but are obviously not in a state to pull it through.

Find yourself a bed and sleep!

Get yourself charged, reboot and go!

If you cannot seem to focus on what you are doing due to fatique, the best and healthiest possible solution would be to let your body and mind relax by releasing all the pent up energy inside of you.

Naturally, you can do that by engaging in some kind of an activity which suits you the best...

• Going for a walk
• Jogging
• Swimming
• Riding a bycicle
• Practicing yoga
• Vacuum cleaning the house

etc.

Suit yourself. The activities are plenty.

Setting up the exact time when you start the work and when you finish it is very useful for many reasons.

• You're organized and therefore feel like doing the job properly
• You have a goal and know that after you have achieved it, you can rest assured
• You control your own time and can adjust it to your daily mood swings and needs

Two heads are better than one.

An idiom that never gets old. If you are having difficulties working through a problem by yourself, seek your friend's help. You can join forces and create as a team.

• Writing shoudler to shoulder,
• Over an open Skype line,
• Facebook chat,
• Open phone call, or
• Via simple text messaging.

You can get excited, fired up and what's most important - encouraged.

Peer pressure isn't necessarily negative. It can give you a mighty push to get yourself started on a topic. It might grow into a form of a competition, but will anyway keep you both working hard.

If you're one of the extreme ones, this is the program for you. It is not about existentialism, it is about purposefully punishing yourself in case of a chronic idleness.

Write or Die  - an online productivity tool that actually forces you to write. Curious? Check it out for yourself.

The primordial solution to everything has always been the acceptance, no?

It is quite fashionable to deal with your fears and anxieties in a calm and meditative way today. The same applies to distractions.

If you cannot fight them actively, you can resist them passively. Accept their presence and learn to swim in their flow.

• In other words: GET USED TO THEM!

Give yourself a nice slap on the cheek, tell yourself that you're doing too much daydreaming and too little writing, and focus!

If you cannot come up with anything good enough to be an interesting writing material, use your real life friends and their spirit for good games to get some ideas.

There are already-made card and board games that you can use, but a more simple trick would be to:

• Write sentences (quotes, or random names and words, names of the movies, books, or people) on the small pieces of paper that you will
• Fold 4 times.
• You can even draw on them instead of writing anything
• You should then put all of the pieces in the hat or some bowl, and make people pick one without looking.
• In turns, you should open your paper and tell a story using a drawing or a word on a paper as a topic or idea. There should be no time for thinking. It is an oral brainstorm.
• You can always add something knew to this game. Introduce more papers as a help. For example, plot twists, or a setting, or an object on an additional paper.

You can always have lots of fun and borrow an idea or two from your inspired company. Maybe even a whole story if it turns our great.

As mentioned on one very interesting web page - How To Write When You're Really Tired, when you don't feel like writing a word and when you really don't have a spare atom to put into the work, one of the ways is to make yourself do it by "bullying yourself into doing it".

In some cases, it does end up being productive and turns out to be a worthy step to push yourself from the phase of idleness into a very productive hour or two of creation.

Alas, in some other cases, people tend to develop an inner resentment against your work that can actually lead you to be even more unproductive later on.

You can take a risk, and it can actually work out for you, but beware of the consequences.

If you are so tired that you cannot even think, say less write those lethargic thoughts down, maybe, you should turn to your inner voice for help. And you will do that by asking yourself those very important questions that we are very often unable to vocalize to the others.

Be honest to yourself and go through the following:

• How do you feel about this whole thing?
• What do you really want to write about?
• What should you do to make this whole process more easier and most importantly, more interesting to you?

Once you have asked yourself these questions, you will get your true answers and finally find your inspiration, by letting yourself free from the restraints of the form.