How Writers Can Use “the Scrum Method” to Finish Drafts on Time
How to complete twice the work in half the time.
“I spent years not finishing work,” Michael Lannan told me. “A friend said, ‘If you can finish something, you are miles ahead of most people.’ Most people don’t finish, because they always pick up something else to distract themselves or just leave it three-quarters of the way through.”
You’ve met people who constantly talk about ideas but never take action.
Unfortunately, those ideas are wasted.
Ideas without execution are mere thoughts.
For many people, talking about an idea helps them validate the idea, but if they never pen the thoughts, the idea dies. They die in the mind or within half-written manuscripts.
It doesn’t matter what you can do, it only matters what you actually do.
- Ken Burns would tell you, “The conversation is meaningless unless you start. Find something that speaks to you.”
- Russell Brunson would tell you, “One hour of doing something is more valuable than ten hours of thinking about something.”
- Casey Neistat would tell you, “Ideas are highly, highly overrated. Execution is all that matters. You either act on ideas or you set them free. You don’t dwell on ideas.”
Thinking and taking action are both valuable, but without the latter, the former doesn’t matter.
It’s one thing to visualize success and another to go after it. The difference is the decision to seek diligence because it’s only within diligence that a creative mind becomes a professional writer.
Michael Jordan may have visualized championships, but he also had to get the ball up the court. He didn’t win those championships sitting in bed thinking about hitting the game-winning shot.
Sure, he did that too, but just because you do the mental work doesn’t mean you can avoid the physical work. The same is true for your pen and pad.
Outside of unfinished manuscripts and half- written screenplays, you’ve probably seen this dynamic in a number of different ways.
- The government project that’s $100 million over budget and two years behind…
- The Silicon Valley start-up that ran out of runway after millions in angel investment funding…
- The restaurant that spent years planning a menu but no time taste-testing in the community…
This list of incomplete half-hearted attempts is so commonplace that Jeff Sutherland came up with a unique idea to disregard the planning phase, force people into action, and help people complete “twice the work in half the time.”
Twice the Work, Half the Time
In a nutshell, Sutherland describes his Scrum technique as a method to create accountability among teams by opening daily methods of communication between groups and evaluating the process in an ongoing manner to create better efficiency.
Here’s a brief example for individuals in the real world:
Let’s say you’re rehabbing a house and have a huge list of work to do. This is where Scrum comes into play. You can use something called the Fibonacci method to rank each item on the list. This numerical system uses a ratio such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 13 because the numbers are more clearly defined than simply 1 through 10 (meaning everyone understands the difference between 2 and 5, where 2 and 3 are negligible).
So you use the numbers to represent time and level of difficulty for each individual task. For example, your list might include painting the living room (3), mounting the television on the wall (2), installing a new hardwood floor (13), and hanging crown molding (5).
Rather than trying to guess the full length of the project, you take a guess at the individual numbers (and discuss them with your team if possible to see where you are missing steps), then you calculate the average numbers completed week-to-week.
After a week or so, you have an accurate average of how long the process will take based on actual results, rather than a guess.
Every other project or system in the world takes an educated guess and then spends months or years coming up with a game plan.
Some government projects literally involve thousands of pages that no one will ever read, for a project that will never get done.
Take Action First, Then Calculate
Scrum changes this foolish yet standard approach to painstakingly long projects and it can do the same for your writing process. It works for everything, but the main idea is to take action first, then calculate results.
The biggest priority behind the Scrum method is to work towards better efficiency, but also more accuracy, within restraints like time. It’s a more accurately defined feedback loop because it uses data rather than guesswork.
In writing, rather than making the assumption you can finish the first draft in a month, just start writing. Then calculate how long it will take you based on initial results.
You write 500 words on day one, but how about days two through seven? Can you keep up this pace? What can you realistically do for two straight weeks? What about four? Now, all of sudden, you have a hypothetical idea of how you could physically write a book each year for a decade.
If this sounds complex or even crazy, that’s fine. The point is, you can figure out your own method, build a realistic timeline, and take action today, not in a year from now.
You can also reassess book one as compared to book two to see if your pace slows down. Either way, putting in the work first is better than just talking about putting in the work.
When you guess how long a project will take, you create risk, but also a false hope.
Instead, you’re better off simply starting, then calculating how long a project will take based on actual results (there could be higher motivation in the beginning, so re-calculate often for an accurate number, especially if you’re tackling a larger than normal project). In short, your process needs to accurately represent the best work method for you.
If you write better in the mornings, write in the mornings.
If you write better in the evenings, write in the evenings.
Put in the work. Check off the boxes on your list and continue. These signals of progress are what turns amateurs into professionals.
“You need signals of progress,” says author James Clear. “One of the challenges of building good habits is that there’s a significant difference from the act of showing up and doing the work.”
He adds, “The feedback loop — those signals of progress — they’re way too delayed, too slow to maintain motivation. Making it visual — a spreadsheet, a habit tracker, an ‘X’ on the calendar — that goes a long way to creating a signal of progress while you’re waiting for those delayed rewards to accumulate.”
Work, then measure. Write while you think. Write in order to think. Write, then edit.
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This has been an excerpt from the book Ink by the Barrel — Secrets From Prolific Writers. Get your copy right here, for free.
