TaskBerry - the fun of discipline. » writing http://www.taskberry.com Get the most out of the things you like and find the things you might like in the rest. Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:37:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hu hourly 1 Write little and often http://www.taskberry.com/hu/2009/03/28/write-little-and-often/ http://www.taskberry.com/hu/2009/03/28/write-little-and-often/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:41:43 +0000 adam http://docs.taskberry.com/?p=44 There was a discussion on the Autofocus forum if this method could be used for writing.  Some argued writing needs to be difficult.  I experimented with a “little and often” approach to it.  It goes like this.
The text has marks in it (I’ll tell you more in a minute).  The whole process is iterating these steps.

  1. Pick a marked part and work on it.  Write as much as you like, be it only a line or many paragraphs.
  2. If you feel it isn’t finished yet, put a mark at the end of it.

A mark consists of

  • some special character not used elsewhere in your text (e.g. the “#” sign)
  • a page number in Autofocus sense
  • an index within a page, I use letters for this

So the very first mark is #1a, then #1b, #1c, etc.  Since there are 26 letters, you can have 26 items on one page.  You can have as many pages as you want, but I prefer to have only one-digit page numbers, so when I’m done with the first page (with marks #1a, …, #1z), I start numbering pages from 1 again.

An Autofocus-like discipline can be applied, too.  In the first round, pick a part whose mark starts with #1.  In the next round, you can pick any part that starts with #1, or if there is none, move on to the #2 parts.

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