Personal Newsletter

I have started roughly forty projects in the last three years and finished six. For a long time I thought this was a discipline problem. I have come round to thinking it is a scope problem. Every unfinished thing on that list was, at the moment I started it, slightly larger than I could hold in my head. Not enormously larger — just enough that I could never see the whole shape at once. And a thing you cannot see the shape of is a thing you cannot tell is nearly done, which means you never get the small hit of progress that carries you through the boring middle. The six I finished were all things I could describe in one sentence on the day I started. That is the only pattern I can find. Not the ones I cared most about, not the ones I had most time for. The ones I could describe. So now I write the sentence first. If the sentence needs a comma and an 'and', the project is two projects and I have to pick one.

1 · A book — Replace this with something you actually read this month, and say in one line why it stayed with you. Specific beats comprehensive. 2 · A tool — Something you started using and would be annoyed to lose. Note what it replaced. 3 · A piece of writing — A link and a sentence on the idea in it that you have since repeated to someone else out loud. 4 · Something small — A recipe, an album, a walk, a shop. The unserious entry is usually the one people reply about.