Incremental

I was talking to a grad student I know. After our co-working session, they listed a few activities they had done and then said “but I didn’t make any progress.” What happened next, you can imagine.

I took the opportunity to pontificate about the importance of incremental progress. If the goal is to complete a chapter or an article, we must count everything we do toward that goal. The transcription of quoted material. The reading of others’ work. The conversations with people. The revision of a draft. Bibliography. Time in the library. Fill in parts of your own process.

My rationale is this: if we count only the goal rather than the steps toward it, then the goal will feel ever further away on a daily basis. Besides – and this strikes me as particularly true for folks undertaking projects that are new to them – you don’t quite know enough about the process to say that one action or another is useless.

When I was writing the first poetry collection, I knew I was inching toward a collection. But, I didn’t know which poems would make it into the eventual book. I submitted to contest after contest and those versions of the manuscript were fine. I was a finalist or a semi-finalist in some cases. However, the collection that will debut in late March has a structure and a series of poems I didn’t anticipate at all two years ago. Those aspects of the book – really important ones! – didn’t occur to me until after conversations with friends. Really, me whining and whining about not knowing what I was doing and my friends saying there there and you know you can do this.

If the major goal is the forest, I am asking you to look at the trees. Yet, there is a danger to measuring progress incrementally. You can miss the forest for the trees. So, I’d encourage you to toggle your view between the shore and the horizon, between the forest and the trees.