8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: incrementalism

Chapter List

  • Iteration Epics

    I love the idea of incrementalism. In fact, I have a confession. The original intent of this website, the whole first draft of the plan, was to write one hundred percent about the practice of incremental work, iteration, and working through challenges, gamification, and step-by-step efforts to a bigger goal.

    Instead, I simply made it a single chapter, and—you may have noticed—I talk about it with a bit of bias and abundance.

    Oddly enough as this explanation post (I’ve been writing one, in order, for each of my topics on every Monday for the last twenty-some weeks) came up in the queue, this project is simultaneously approaching it’s two hundredth post. In fact, this may very well be it.  And now well into my tenth month of writing an article for every weekday of this year so far, I’m approaching eighty thousand words of content on this site.

    Eighty thousand words is a book. Printed, you’d pick it up, hold it in your hand and think “Jeeze, this guy’s got something to get off his chest. This is a thick book.”

    I’ve made that. I’ve written it. I’ve posted it. I’ve refined it, tweaked it, supplemented it with citations and definitions. I’ve sent it out into the world for the better part of a year for anyone to read. And I’ve done it all a few hundred words at a time, each and every weekday, iteratively and in increments.

    If that doesn’t hammer home the point I’m trying to make I don’t know what else does. Either way, under the category of Iteration & Epics I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Mile Stone

    Once again I am going to pause and point out one of the core tenets of this writing project: iteration and incremental work leads to interesting things.

    This post not only marks the end of July and the end of seven months of regular posting here, but the one hundred and fiftieth mini-essay.

    It is all that extra little bit impressive (to me, anyhow) because I also managed to take a week-long vacation where I was almost completely without usable internet for most of the trip and still managed to have set up this project to hum along without human intervention for the duration.

    Blah, blah, blah, whatever—you shrug.

    But here’s my whole point: I do stuff like this all the time. I learn new skills, I build crazy projects. I tackle huge efforts of fitness, art, or creativity. And then people wince and say something like—well, good for you but I could never find the time or energy or motivation.

    Incrementalism. That’s it. One little bit at a time. One piece each day. A few words. Ten minutes of practice. Pulling your attention away from the screen in your hand and putting it onto a keyboard or a pen or a musical instrument or… whatever. 

    Incrementalism. It leads to works of substance and beyond.

    Seven months ago I started typing a few words about the push behind creative life and at the heart of that was this silly example—which is now a collection of writing with one hundred and fifty articles, and no plan to stop.

    Golf clap. Or start something for yourself today. And tomorrow. And the day after ad naseum. 

  • Proper Bookish

    You’ll need to excuse my excitement yet again. I’m going on holiday for most of the front half of July so I’ve been writing these posts nearly three weeks in advance to get a leg up on the schedule and timing… and I’ve just this morning (in early July) looked at the word count on this project.

    It’s now well over fifty thousand. A proper book.

    Fifty thousand words was always the novel-length goal set out at the beginning of November when that infamous[1] novel writing challenge took place and we all rushed to pen fifty thousand words in thirty days.

    I now only point to it as a milestone.

    Oh, and as a reminder about my biggest and most core bit of quasi-advice on this project: the power of iteration and incrementalism.  Again, and again, and probably again I will point to these very words and just say: twenty minutes a day and a couple hundred words. It adds up.

    Heck, I don’t know if some random book publisher is out there trolling around looking for the next project, but hey… this needs some more organization and polish, but I’ve got the guts of something serious here. Don’t you agree?

    Okay, fine. I’ll back off the self-aggrandizing and get back on topic.

    Fifty thousand words of something is definitely not nothing—nor is it everything—but it is worth noting, particularly as a point about putting in the work. 

    I did. I am. I will. You can, too. 

  • Canada Day-ish

    Being Canadian means our annual celebration of national pride falls on the exact-ish half way point of the year. Where New Years Day is the first day of the year, Canada Day, July 1st, is on the first day of the second half of the year.

    This year also happens to be the day when I mark the exact six month anniversary of this writing project. It’s been half a year of daily-ish posts.

    What that means for the site is that after six months of working on this project, I have accumulated one hundred and twenty-seven (plus this one) posts on some meandering thoughts on creativity and pursuing a creative-ish life.

    Routine can lead to profoundly interesting things. Iteration of effort, keeping at something through incremental addition and improvements can break through the overwhelming perception of size and complexity and spark a kind of driving force that can make anyone successful-ish.

    Readers may have already noted that I am an evangelist-ish for the the incrementalism of things.  Doing a little bit each day can simply get the work done.

    And on a day like this, when I’ve crossed yet another milestone and keep going, posting the next post and the next and knowing that there are likely a few more in the queue even as you are reading these words, is the best I can do to show by example of what twenty minutes of writing per day can accomplish-ish.

  • Baby Steps

    I have a piece of advice that I’m writing mostly for myself here: stop thinking so big. 

    Start small.

    Start with the achievable and work your way up.

    I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

    The big project is simply too overwhelming.

    Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

    Something smaller has to come first.

    In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

    I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.