Get over Perfectionism

From Weekly I/O#36


To get over perfectionism to write and publish more, try writing without capitalization and using the 10-Point Scale.

Articles: why i'm writing without capitalization and 10-Point Scale & Wikipedia

Many people are afraid of writing in public because they think their article is not good enough, including me. Last year I published 5 articles while having more than 20 article drafts unpublished since I don't think they are good enough.

Recently, I bumped into these two articles talking about how to get over perfectionism in terms of writing. They both adopted the same idea: signaling how seriously their readers should view the piece to lower the readers' expectations and, hence, the writer's.

Justin Mares did it by writing those articles that he's not editing without capitalization while writing articles with more complete thoughts with standard capitalization.

Nick Yoder used a strategy to publish ideas instantly. Every new article he wrote will be set to go live on the website 24 hours after he gets the idea, regardless of the progress. He will show a sticker with a score indicating the stage of completeness at the top of each article. The score is on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is "title only", 4 is "All the key points (poorly written)", 7 is "I could stop here with only mild embarrassment," and 10 is "complete thought".

In his words:

"By pushing a project into the sunlight, I am forced to either keep improving it or allow its imperfection to languish publicly."

By doing this, he anticipated getting faster output, more feedback, obvious next steps, and less hesitation on when to publish the articles formally.


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