Boy, thermal growth bites everybody eventually.

I spent 6 years telling every customer in Clearwater that glue down was for offices and hospitals only, so I get the humble pie you're eating. The felt backing makes the glue actually grab right, and once you nail the trowel notch the carpet sits flat with no re-stretch calls eating your profit. My knees still hate me for waiting so long to switch.

Oh this is me, I do the exact same thing and I never thought about why until now. I have a folder full of prompt stuff I banged out in 20 minutes and then closed the notebook like it was a chore I finished, but the pieces people actually liked at my table were the ones I sat with for another hour after the timer went off. There was this one about a woman finding a grocery list in a coat pocket at a thrift store and I almost threw it out, then I came back to it that night and it turned into 6 pages. Nobody ever tells you the timer is the thing that is wrong, not the prompt. You are right that writing toward an answer kills it, you can feel it going flat while you are doing it. And no, listening in at the library is not weird, that is just where the good stuff is, half my notebook is stuff I overheard at the laundromat.