First Draft 🗒️

Being a perfectionist is hard work. It's bloody awful, really. Perfectionism is the enemy of a good habit, the best friend of a writing block.

But there's hope, because if we're being honest, you don't have to be perfect and your standards of your own work are probably too high. My way of dealing with this character trait is to embrace a Minimum-Viable-Product-Mindset™ (excuse the software engineering terminology). Enter "First Drafts". Instead of writing a perfect blog post (which happens almost never according to my standards), I write a "good enough" post. Or even less than that. A draft, really.

Once that draft outlines my idea, it's ready to be put out there. Out onto my test environment, a place on the web with a secret URL that I visit more often than I care to admit. I let it sit there and let some time pass.

Later in the day or even the next day, if I'm not too eager to publish, or the idea needs some more time to blossom, I revisit it. Now, I have a foundation. I don't start from zero. I continue with a first draft. I edit, I simplify, I rephrase, or to put it briefly: I have fun. Editing is amazing! Once I've done a couple of editing iterations (more drafts that I periodically "snapshot" and push to my test environment and later start off from as a new foundation) I tend to be happy with what I have. Then it's time to publish.

What's great about having a first draft is that it sets my thoughts in motion. There's something I started to think about. It's out there – and I think that's the important part. It might still need a little something, before it can evolve and finally make sense to the world. Or at least to me.

Fuck you, perfectionism.