Incrementalism

I’m posting this on the Summer Solstice, 2019. June 21. Instead of my usual writing about the facts and folklore of this important date on the calendar, I’m going to use it as an example. Of incremental progression. Of gradual transformation. And more personally, of facing a big challenge and rather than freezing at the enormity of the project, changing my mind to one of small, additive steps. Until the overwhelming project is complete.

Like writing a novel. Or shoveling and raking twelve tons of gravel to create a new parking place.

Here’s my story…

My wife and I needed a parking spot. For workmen, for my brother-in-law, for visiting guests. You see, we live in the woods of central Virginia. Trees all around and only a narrow gravel driveway leading to the house. We wanted to do something about that.

So I consulted with an excavator about grading the site and a rock hauler about the required gravel to finish it off and blend in with our existing driveway. Here’s what it looked like to start with:

I was all set to kick the project into gear but the grading guy suddenly got busy, and my preferred gravel hauler disappeared out of town. So there was only one thing left to do: I decided to manually clear and grade the site and spread the gravel myself. A job that would have taken a couple of mechanized hours suddenly morphed into one that could take weeks or months.

Needless to say, it was a huge challenge to do this single-handedly, but I was up for it. I just called on my past experience with “Incremental Dynamics” to help me out. I would take the big project and break it into small pieces. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and all that.

So the steps began. Working a little each day, I…

* Used a rake, pick axe, shovel, and a level to start clearing and moving dirt around:

* Dug out a lower “terrace” for a base of large stones (it was swampy and collected water there):

* Drove to the rock quarry to find the right size of large #1 stones for the dug-out terrace:

* Picked out the stones by hand and loaded up trunk loads of them (several):

* Placed the large stones one by one, jigsaw puzzle style …

… until I had a good base going:

* Called the quarry to send a truck and dump 12 tons of #21A gravel:

* Here’s the gravel ready to be shoveled, raked, spread, and leveled—by hand:

* Here are my tools:

* Only a little bit to go: (fatigued hands shaking!)

* Gravel spreading complete but Oops—looks like I didn’t need 12 tons after all. Those piles are extra, and it all needs to be moved. More shoveling!

* Finally, after several weeks of daily, incremental work, here’s what I had:

Conclusion
By breaking down what seemed like an intimidating task into discrete, daily pieces of work, I got the job done. Sure, it took a while, but you know what? I started to look forward to my daily dose of manual labor. And it helped that I could see clear progress each day.

And I’ve applied the same principle of incrementalism to authoring books. The initial thought of writing 100,000 words or so is daunting. But if I write a little each day, well, eventually it gets done.

Such is the case for the new novel I’m working on. I just finished the first draft. One day at a time.

— Harald