"writing documents is much harder work than it looks. Coding is pifflingly easy by comparison"

I'm very, very glad you just said that! Before I went into hospital I was writing something about sample prep and felt like I was achieving absolutely nothing useful because it seemed to be going so slowly and was so difficult. It didn't help that I couldn't sit down properly to do it, of course.

It may not help that I've spent way more of my life coding than I have writing documents, of course :-)

Some kinds of writing I find effortlessly easy: when writing LJ entries and most kinds of email, in particular, I often feel as if I just spew out a barely edited stream of consciousness and it naturally seems to come out in sensibly structured paragraphs and with a plausible progression from premises to conclusion. I once sent email to a Cambridge English graduate without really thinking about it that hard, and in the reply they said they wished their writing style was as good as mine, which startled me. (On the other hand, sometimes that lack of thought causes me to perpetrate linguistic atrocities without even noticing, such as sentences longer than Judge Jeffreys'.)

But there are other kinds of writing which are incredibly hard and I'm not entirely sure why. I think partly it has something to do with not knowing my audience so well: I find it much easier to communicate to specific people than I do to people-in-general. Yesterday's document, on the other hand, I think I found hard because I was having to transform procedural knowledge into declarative: I was explaining what I do in my job and why it's complicated and fiddly, and normally I don't have to think about that in words, I just get on and do it. And while there are certain specific questions somebody could have asked me which would have instantly tapped a rich stream of useful information and caused me to talk informatively for fifteen minutes, it was much harder to stare at a blank editor window and think up those questions for myself, because "what does a newcomer to my field need to know most?" is not the angle from which I usually find myself approaching that knowledge.

I remember working outside sometimes in the summer. It was generally very successful (and I had wireless). I hypothesised that a new environment could be fairly good to work in, perhaps because you haven't had a chance to develop bad habits; it mightn't stay that way foreever.

In my experience, people who work from home polarise to a large extent into slackers and workaholics (the latter often overcompensating for a fear of becoming the former). Those who manage to walk the line of normal working hours are few and far between.