Very engaging and substantive piece! I couldn't write my thesis, so I started taking stabs at it on Medium. Still a work in progress. But I totally support and endorse the notion that progress is ALWAYS good, no matter how plentiful or minuscule it is -- you're by definition always better off than you were before.

When I'm a wreck mentally, sometimes I player Minesweeper with the difficulty turned way up (custom 160 mines over 600 squares) to get focused and orderly in thought, most useful for resolving problems in a first draft ("what am I really trying to say here?").