Brad Salomons

Tag: increments

  • two hundred and fifty

    two hundred and fifty

    There are many ways to approach a problem, but by far my steady go-to approach has long been incrementalism.

    A little over a year ago I started writing a novel.

    This is actually a complex and confusing anecdote about sitting down to write a trilogy of novels, nearly finishing the first one, deciding that it was actually not a trilogy but just one great big story, then reopening what I thought was a climactic conclusion of my book to instead trudge into the effort of writing another entire novel-worth of story to finish the plot in a meaningful and interesting way.

    The first half took me two months. The second half is approaching a year worth of effort.

    Of course, in that time life has got in the way. I’ve been working, parenting, going back to school, and coding a video game—but I digress.

    The point is that I have been incrementally working towards finishing the novel. I have been writing it two hundred and fifty words at a time. Little steps. Inching closer to completion. Trudging ever forward.

    Is this the ideal approach?

    Heck, I don’t know. I’d like to tell you that I have stumbled onto some great secret of success, but the reality is that slow and steady progress is such an old piece of advice that it literally has it’s own spirit animal in the tortoise.

    Each day I sit down and write (at least) 250 words, one word at a time, one keyboard stroke at a go, all to add onto my novel. Each day I incrementally move slighty closer to the end. Each day I am 250 words closer to being done.

    My point is that some problems and projects are just big and there is no quick and easy fix.

    My fix, neither quick nor easy, is to write two hundred and fifty words each day. Like a tortoise in a foot race.

  • coder thoughts

    Coding is an iterative space in which I live.

    I build something that some would call a minimum viable product. It is little more than a toy that does something simple and basic and imperfect, yet it is functional. Once that utility reaches a certain point it is not unheard of for me to abandon such projects out of boredom or lack of direction, but on occasion the iterative mind steps in.

    I will think of this minimum viable product that with a few more hours of work it can perhaps do more things that would build off the simplicity and basic functionality. So I write more code and launch more tweaks. 

    This goes on and on in waves, sometimes for years, and after a long while composed of stints of development, revising, improving, removing, and refining I find myself with something that is no longer a minimum viable product, but rather something much more complex and interesting.

    This iterative thought about a wouldn’t-it-be-neat-if project has manifested by stepwise effort into a small but effective little code base that moves data around and renders web pages and sends emails and validates users and whatever other clever little algorithmic functionality that I have been poking away at making work.

    Sure, I could have sat down and mapped out a project in its entirety and worked tirelessly to make it all at once, but there is something organic and curious about my method, curious about this space in which I choose to call myself a coder.

  • day by day by day

    I can’t write enough about incrementalism.

    The classic proverb asks: how do you eat an elephant?

    One bite at a time.

    I have been writing and creating and writing and making and writing and posting. If I went back in time a year to when I set out on this little writing life adventure and looked out upon the quantity of work that I have banked in the intervening year, I know I would be completely overwhelmed.

    Think of what you can accomplish just doing a little bit each day or even each week.

    If you record ten seconds of video every day for a year, by the end of the year you will have over an hour of footage.

    If you open a document and write one paragraph of one hundred words per day every day for a year you will have a document over thirty six thousand words long.

    If you post one thing online a day every day for a year, you will have over three hundred and sixty posts at the end.

    Incrementalism. One bite at a time.

  • critical mass

    After a year of pecking away at this thing I’ve learned to think of as a “writing life” I’ve found that I’ve kinda reached a critical mass of projects.

    True. Part of me thought I would have created something worthy of publication by now, but rather that has not been the case. For example, I have a written 80% of a novel. I have penned about thirty scripts for yet-unrecorded podcast episodes. I have typed out a couple of completed short stories that need editing and the bones of at least a dozen more that need focus. My word processor files are now filled with so many personal essays on such a wide range of topics and in such a broad state of completion that I can barely keep track save for just to open one that looks interesting and polish, tweak, add, or prune.

    And. It would be fair to say that I have typed a quarter of a million words in the last year. Sure, I’ve not but published a whole number percentage of those but they exist and they are not without value. Hardly.

    In fact, as I stated, I’m at something of a critical mass. I have such a broad number of great little projects in progress that on any given day I can wake up and type a few hundred words here or few hundred words there and make progress on any one of those projects. Like, if I’m so inclined I can write another chapter in my novel, scope out a few more pages of that comic script I’ve been working on, or edit one of my essays for just a hint more of clarity.

    None of this is wasted effort. It’s all incrementally building and growing and progressing.

    It all just adds bit by bit, drip by drab, onto the whole of my collected efforts.

    And while I may sometimes feel a little discouraged by the lack of publication-readiness of most of it, I am deeply encouraged that so much of it is slowly and steadily moving with momemtum towards that publish-ready state at some point in the future. Maybe even the near future.

  • increments

    I was mowing my lawn yesterday and I couldn’t help but notice how great my yard is doing this year. It’s thriving.

    Sure, there are still a few patchy places in the grass where the dog focuses her efforts. And sure, a couple of the trees could use some pruning, and sure, I’ll have a dozen new dandelions to pull later today… but for the most part, it’s a banner year for our little suburban garden lot.

    And the difference, I instantly realized, is incrementalism.

    Usually, when I’m a lot busier of a guy, I reserve yard work for the weekends or my rare days off. I try to get as much done as I can on a Saturday afternoon. Then inevitably, I tire myself out, miss a few things, or just opt to sit in a lawn chair and admire any marginal progress I’ve made.

    But this year, with a few more spare hours on my hands and between writing stints or while literally waiting for the watercolour paint to dry, I’ve been poking at it. Incrementally.

    Thirty minutes here pulling weeds. Fifteen over there trimming the shrubs. Another bit of time to rake or prune or edge or any of a hundred little tasks.

    And it has all added up. The yard, as I wrote above, is having a banner year even though it seems like I’ve put considerably less effort into it. Fewer long days of hard work, but lots of little blocks of effort, all of it adding up to real, visible progress.

    I’m sure I don’t need to explain the analogy here.