Tbh throwing out the notes and setting a timer might be the thing that's actually causing the problem. Those 6 pages about his dog and his soup are not wasted, that's your brain telling you who this guy is, and the real story usually lives in that stuff. I'd keep the notes and just grab one weird detail from them, like the soup, then write the scene where he eats it alone on a Tuesday. The backstory is not the enemy here, it's the fuel, you just gotta stop treating it like homework and start pulling one thread into the actual scene.

Learned that lesson the hard way myself, though I always figured it was just me rushing the cut. What you're really hitting on is that wet brick plus wet blade equals a slick mess that grabs instead of grinding, and in Tucson heat the water evaporates off the blade so fast that the brick stays soaked while the blade goes dry. That mismatch is what makes it bite. Same thing happens with any tool where the material and the cutter aren't matched up, like trying to cut soft pine with a dull chain or running cheap pads on a warped rotor. The fix is almost always the same, get both sides to the same condition before you start. Ten seconds in the dunk bucket makes sense because the brick surface gets wet but the inside stays dry enough to give the blade something to grab.