Do it badly first: progress beats perfect

Perfection really is the enemy. Waiting until I can do something right is the most reliable way I know to never do it at all.

The first version is supposed to be bad

Voltaire wrote that the best is the enemy of the good, and he was quoting an older Italian proverb, so people have known this a long time. The writer Anne Lamott has a chapter in Bird by Bird called "Shitty First Drafts," and her point holds far beyond writing: the bad version is what teaches you what the good version needs. Process maps, garden beds and status reports all work the same way.

Practice doing it badly, on purpose

• Set a timer for 15 minutes, make a rough version, and stop.
• Sow the seeds in a crooked row. They'll still come up.
• Send the first status report with a few blanks, and fill them in next week.

Then improve one thing at a time

This is what continuous improvement means in practice. The Japanese word kaizen, made widely known in the West by Masaaki Imai, describes small, steady changes. The loop most of us use is plan, do, check, act, from Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming: try a change, check what happened, keep it if it worked, then go again.

My garden is the proof. I've had a bed of radishes vanish to voles overnight, a corn patch that made one inedible ear, and a potato harvest that was barely worth digging up. I didn't start out with chaos-sown beds and cover crops. I started with square-foot beds and a lot of flops, kept what worked and changed one thing at a time.

Where good work actually comes from

Small improvements stack up. Ten small changes you actually make beat one perfect plan that never leaves the notebook.