Work is full of blank pages

Writers being who they are, had crafted an interesting term for writer's block, the "tyranny of the blank page". It's when faced with a fresh sheet of paper, they know they have to write something, but the boundless possibilities can make a writer become overwhelmed and get stuck. Obviously, the problem is one that can be overcome, or else we wouldn't have professional writers. Those folk have given tons of advice to newer writers facing writer's block over the years. Most of the advice takes the form of advising people to just put something, anything, down onto the page even if it makes no sense, starts in the middle, or will be thrown out later.

As someone who's been writing at least 1 thing a week for over 325 weeks now, I've internalized my own ways of working through writer's block to the point where I rarely notice it anymore. Practice and familiarity within a space really do make things that seem initially daunting almost routine. It's given me a super power of being able to throw a decent presentation together in the space of a few hours if absolutely necessary, filling a bunch of pages with text in a sitting.

But recently, in my n-th attempt at learning to use a DAW (digital audio workstation) and MIDI equipment to play around and make simple music to better understand how music works has put me in front of a blank page that I very seriously don't know how to deal with. Here I am, sitting in front of Ableton, and my mind is whirling around in circles. Do I play with sound design in a synth today? Do I just plop down a basic drum line to start? Should I derp out a melodic phrase first? Wait, shouldn't I pick out a key, even if arbitrarily first? Let's forget about chord progressions for now because I'm already overwhelmed. Oooh fun preset sound I just pressed.

There are so, so many choices that I could make, and I'm so unfamiliar with the complex interaction of all of them that I can't just "take a default and change it later" yet. My inexperience makes all the choices feel equally important when honestly anyone with a lick of musical experience could probably easily pick one and work out the rest in relation to prior decisions.

It's decidedly a very uncomfortable experience to take on a task that you have no idea how to accomplish. It's worse when I'm figuring all this out on my own. But while pondering over this blank page issue today, I suddenly realized that there doesn't seem to be a thing called 'analyst block'. Considering how doing data analysis of any sort involves a creative mix of methodologies mixed with domain knowledge, how often are we faced with situations where we are handed a dataset and don't know what to do to the point where we freeze up in panic? Despite all our potential limitations and ignorance, why is it that we can often find a way forward?

To put the question more concretely, would I be able to find a path forward if I was abducted and told to analyze medical trial data, or data experiment data from some high energy physics experiment? Both are things that I am completely unqualified on multiple levels to do without a ton of question-asking. Even if I'm a quick study, these topics are so alien to me that I'm positive I can't pull a week of all-nighters and figure stuff out. I'm pretty sure I'd at least panic a bit in such a situation.

But as data people we're thrown into relatively unfamiliar datasets on a pretty regular basis and are expected to do good work. So it's a bit curious why we're not more often under the tyranny of the blank SQL editor.

Some boring reasons for not going into a panic

The most boring reason why we don't immediately become useless when faced with new data is because new data is usually from a related domain to what we are already familiar with. This means we have a large amount of existing domain knowledge in our heads that lets us at the least stumble our way towards the correct answer. This is only effective when we don't wander too far away from our domains, of course.

Another really boring reason for why we don't freeze up often is that, unlike writers, data analysts and researchers are encouraged to reference and take ideas and methods from people who've done things before us. Some of the more thorny but rare problems we might encounter in industry may have already been solved, or at least discussed, in academic literature, blog posts, whitepapers, or other reports. Creativity isn't an absolute requirement in the job (though, it's often needed to adapt research paper knowledge to local reality).

Both boring reasons have their limits and will break at the more extreme margins, but very few of us willingly put ourselves into such situations to begin with.

And of course there's some hubris

While I'm a pretty strong advocate for bringing humility to every data problem, when you've been around a bunch of years, there's a certain amount of confidence (or hubris) that comes with older age. While I certainly wouldn't trust myself to do a correct medical trial or physics experiment on my own, I at least am confident that if I spoke to a bunch of people and asked a lot of questions I'd be able to at least help people in those situations. So long as there are people who know what needs to be done, I'm pretty sure I can help with the execution part of a wholly unfamiliar topic.

And an appreciation for being new

Despite it all, I think this foray into unfamiliar musical territory serves to give me a reminder of what a brand new, freshly minted data person must feel when given their first Real World Task. "Where do I even begin?!" must be near the top of their mind.

Data work in schools and research programs are helpful in giving them familiarity with how things could be done using common methods like regression. But there's still lots of gaps where someone new will be forced to confront a nearly blank page. Blank pages are all around us in the typical work environment.

The SQL query to pull data to analyze is often a big trouble spot since knowing the language isn't enough, you need to know the specific quirks of the data in the tables in order to be effective. Same for putting code into a new and unfamiliar codebase with all its unspoken tribal knowledge bits involved to get things working in production. Even the presentation style and format that's expected when we present to stakeholders can be a pretty terrifying blank page, even if they're only responsible for a single slide in a deck.

Over time, we all eventually learn how to fill those blank pages. But take a moment to pause and think about the process it took for you to get to the point where it feels natural and easy.

When we're onboarding new teammates, especially ones fresh out of school, part of the work is helping them figure all this stuff out.

I'm probably gonna go take a look at some onboarding docs and see if we need to overhaul stuff.

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About this newsletter

I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.

All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise credited.

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