Word After Word

Quality engineers study completion. They are process artists, masters of removing the obstacles that block a person from doing something she wants to do. If you aren’t writing, and you want to write, consider Quality Control. Be an empirical kid, fascinated by process.

So many great books don’t get finished because we writers don’t live in a culture of completion. We often work alone. No boss, no supervision, no deadline, no rules, no mom, no secondary check. Without meetings, reports, deadlines, updates, stakes, or consequences, we are happy. But is the work? Are you finishing things?

Three pieces of Quality are useful. Simple, common sense:

1. Clarify Future
   State and
   Current
   State. You want to write a book (future state). Current state is you work two jobs, have kids, and your aging mother in law lives in the room where you used to have your office.  How will your book get written? You’re going to need a really clear, good, realistic plan. Or it won’t.

2. Timeline, Small Steps. Like Toyota, I have a sticky board—mine is a 90 cent piece of posterboard with sticky notes on it. The sticky notes are in order—they each contain one step, one part of what I need to do to write my book.

How will you get from your current state (not writing the book) to your future state (it’s done)? You list out all the steps, and then put them, in order, on the board. The quality people are geniuses at this. They take into account emotional blocks, time obstacles, where the paper clips are stored. They analyze fear. They factor in lunch.

Quality is simply looking at what is. (The reasons your book isn’t getting written are probably large, complicated, and real. It’s unlikely you are procrastinating, lazy, untalented, and wrong.) 

What are the small steps to get from where you are now to the book written?  What if your writing time was, for awhile, spent examining the process and breaking it down into tiny, tiny steps. And then putting them in order, in real time?

3. Every Morning Meeting. Every morning you have a five minute meeting (with your team if you work at an office; for us, it’s a meeting you have with yourself and your writing project). Review where you are. It’s the same meeting every day. You can never miss the meeting. One, two, three—it goes fast. What are you supposed to write today? New obstacles? What got done yesterday? Good? Problems, impediments? What are the steps?

      You can spend a lot of time creating new systems (I do) and they won’t work if you don’t use them.

            If I don’t clarify and resolve the obstacles, nothing will change.     

            If I don’t give myself good daily writing assignments, little gets written.     

            If I don’t review, I will drift.