The value of incremental progress
I am not a champion gardener. If you’ve been following this blog, this will not come as a big shock to you.
And I believe I mentioned before how I live in a sub-tropical climate. Plant life has a tendency toward the over-exuberant. Unless it’s dropping dead from heat stroke or complications due to my lack of green-thumbness. Mostly, however, it is over-exuberant. There’s a vine thing, for example. . .well, let’s just say, it won’t surprise me if it creeps in the window and strangles me in my sleep one night.
Anyhow, it must follow as the night the day *(I knew I could get Shakespeare in here somewhere!), that Weeding 101 would become a required course.
The problem is it is also extremely hot down here. Extremely hot. Hotter than hell, eggs frying on the sidewalk, where’s a cooling shelter hot.
I am a person who likes to finish what she starts. Preferably within minutes.
Back when I was doing a lot more programming than I do now, working on large and complex projects with shifting requirements and ‘scope creep’ of epic proportions, I was most often hired by Tony Coretto, the CEO of PNT Marketing Services, Inc. Tony is a most excellent boss. In the midst of chaos and looming deadlines, he would talk with unfailing optimism about “incremental progress.”
I’m sorry to say that I never totally appreciated the value of that way of looking at things until it came to weeding the flower beds in a hot, humid July in Florida. It is not possible–unless you have greater masochistic tendencies than I do–to eliminate all weeds in one marathon session. A person can, however, make incremental progress.
Going out before the sun is high enough to beat down on the flower bed, you can work for a half hour or so in the shade. Taking out the weed whacker in the late evening, around 7, there might be a breeze coming off the water.
It will never all be done at once in one shining example of impeccable landscaping. The campaign is not one of shock and awe. It’s guerilla warfare with intermittent weeding sorties.
Incremental progress.
And you know what?
It turns out that’s the only way to finish any piece of writing. A little at a time.
So this Tuesday’s Tip is to make a sortie. Set a timer and write for five minutes. Ten minutes. One minute. Any increment at all leads to incremental progress.
* Hamlet, Act I, sc.3
