Creative constipation

A few years ago, I suggested why focusing directly on “quality” wasn’t as productive as it sounded: In many cases, and definitely my own experience, “quality” is an abstract word that smart people use to procrastinate. There’s an exceptional subset of people who are really good at shipping high quality work, but more often than not, that’s not the case. What happens is the bar for “quality” makes people procrastinate, because they keep setting the bar higher and higher and higher, or scope expands impossibly and uncontrollably. At some point, it becomes impossible to meet the expectation with the resources and time they have, so they don’t end up shipping. Their incomplete work sits somewhere inside the company or inside their own personal archives, and it’s not allowed to add value to anyone’s life. Carol Lei describes this experience well, likening it to constipation. One solution is to make being creative an ordinary, every day, habit like using the bathroom. That’s what I’m doing…