The Hourglass Writer - Navigating Time, Creativity, and Chaos.

There are two types of people in the world, those who write with clarity and those who torture their audience with an existential crisis of verbosity. The former understand that writing is about making choices. The latter? They drown in a flood of possibilities and suffocate under their own indecision.

The hourglass is the perfect metaphor for how writing and, frankly, most of life, should work. Start broad, get ruthlessly narrow, then expand again. Simple. Elegant. Brutal.

The beginning of any writing process is a mess. It should be. This is where you dump everything. Ideas. Random thoughts. That absurd analogy you’re convinced will be brilliant in context (it won’t be). The key here is volume. More is better. Bad ideas? Absolutely. Get them out. Writing, like dating, is a numbers game, you have to go through a lot of garbage before you find something worth committing to.

But here’s the trap, most writers (and people) never make it past this stage. They confuse exploration with execution. They think more ideas equals better ideas. It doesn’t. If it did, X-threads would be Pulitzer-worthy. Instead, they hoard ideas like a doomsday prepper hoards canned goods, useless unless you actually do something with them.

This is where the real work happens. You take that beautiful, chaotic mess and force it through the narrowest point of the hourglass. This is the ruthless part. Every word, every sentence, every idea has to earn its keep. No squatters. No dead weight.

The most successful people seem to be the ones who can edit. Edit their time. Edit their relationships. Edit their priorities. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. The difference? Some people treat it like an all-you-can-eat buffet, piling on everything until their plate collapses. Others curate like a Michelin-starred chef, choosing only what adds value.

Good writing, like a good life, is about cutting the distractions and distilling the essence. Brutality is clarity. Clarity is power.

Once you’ve passed through the bottleneck, you expand again. But this time, it’s deliberate. You’re not dumping everything back in, you’re giving space to what matters. The best writing doesn’t feel dense, it feels precise. Airy. Purposeful.

Once you’ve cut the noise, you create room for the right things to flourish, deep work, meaningful relationships, actual joy. The problem isn’t that people don’t have time, it’s that they don’t make time. They stay stuck in the bottleneck, trying to keep everything, refusing to commit. Writing is no different. Expansion without selection is more noise.

The hourglass model applies to everything, writing, business, decision-making. Most people never make it through the bottleneck because they’re too scared to cut. Be different. Embrace the chaos, be decisive in your choices, then give what remains the space it deserves.

The best writing, and the best lives, are built by those who know what to let go of.