By BookBaby author Michael Gallant
Breaking down your writing process into a string of micro-tasks can increase your productivity and help you tackle daunting challenges.
In my recent column “One Simple Question To Ask When Self-editing,” I wrote about condensing your writing self-review strategy to a simple binary question. Now, I want to share an equally simple strategy that has helped me tackle complex projects and open creative doors.
Whether I’m compiling an initial brainstorm or polishing a final edit, I continually step away from the big picture and ask myself, “what’s one next thing I can do to help this piece of writing?” Bare bones as this practice may seem, it has proven to be powerful and consistently effective.
I started approaching my writing this way after reading about Coree Woltering, an ultra-long distance runner who, at one point, ran upwards of fifty miles a day, every day, for three straight weeks.
How did he pull off such a mountainous performance? “I’m really good at breaking things down into small increments and setting micro-goals,” Woltering told The New York Times. In practice, Woltering often approaches his running in ten-second segments, resetting his mind and expectations after each one, and repeating until the task is done. At times, the article reports, he spends hours on end counting to ten, over and over again.
While counting to ten repeatedly may not be the most conducive strategy for writing, following a similar micro-goal approach can get you far. When I repeatedly ask myself to think of one next thing I can do to help my writing, I’m following Woltering’s example of chipping away at large tasks by setting and completing much smaller tasks along the way.
In your own writing, whatever the genre or format, try setting micro-goals and looking for one next thing that can help. Here are some points to keep in mind as you give this strategy a try.
Little changes add up
Sometimes when I sit down to write, all I can think about — or all I might have time to do — is coming up with a better title or opening sentence. Or maybe I only have bandwidth to clean up footnotes, try to imagine better adjectives or adverbs for a certain paragraph, fact-check quotes, or even get the spacing and font of my word processing document right.
At times, these steps can feel frustratingly inadequate when compared with the overall task of finishing a piece of writing. But at the same time, when I ask myself to find and do one next thing, I’m grounding every bit of micro-progress in the goal of completing a solid and powerful piece of writing. No matter how inconsequential micro-tasks may feel at the moment, they all have to be completed at some point before a piece is done. By handling whatever micro-task is doable at the moment, whenever I’m able to do it, I can gain satisfaction in knowing that I’m moving my project concretely forward.
Just as I imagine Woltering does sometimes after counting to ten a thousand times, I can look back at all the micro-goals I’ve completed and feel proud of the significant progress they add up to.
Momentum works in your favor
Getting started can be hard, but riding momentum is easier. That’s why asking yourself about the one next thing can be a powerful way forward. Repeatedly considering what the next tiny step should be — and then completing it — quickly becomes habit. Once you hit your flow, the micro-challenges start to fall like dominos and the micro-accomplishments accumulate faster into creative momentum.
Your focus on details means less to revise later
By always paying attention to the one next thing that will move your project ahead, you’re repeatedly zeroing in on important, individual facets of your work. This could be anything from getting a sentence’s flow correct to making sure your paragraph headings are in place or your paragraphs are in coherent order.
Regardless of the context, see if focusing on one next thing makes your revision and editing easier in the long run. I’ve found that this strategy keeps my mind where it needs to be as I write, getting my work much closer to done with the first draft and cutting down the number of typos, organizational issues, and storytelling hiccups I might run into later.
The big picture is still there
A devil’s advocate argument against micro-goals says that, by focusing on small details and incremental progress, you lose sight of the project as a whole. I haven’t found this to be true at all; to the contrary, using micro-goals makes my big-picture understanding of a writing project stronger and more nuanced.
If I continually ask myself what the one next thing is, every small task is defined in the context of helping finish the larger work—which means I’m at least glancing at the big picture with every micro-step forward.
Especially when writing seems the most challenging, I’ve found the strategy of asking myself about one next thing can be transformative, freeing, and effective—particularly when nothing else feels like it’s working.
Hopefully, this approach can provide similar fuel for your writing process as well.
Related Posts
One Simple Question To Ask When Self-editing
Is There Rhythm In Your Writing?
When Is The Right Time To Write?
How To Read Your Writing From An Editor’s Perspective
It’s Time To Unlearn What You Know About The Writing Process
This BookBaby blog article Build Creative Momentum By Setting Micro-Goals For Your Writing appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .