Writing and Scheduling

Twitter

• @golden_lucky But I still don’t know how to help with that, because I have a deep-seated awareness that writing is not a process that follows a schedule. I mean, even the process of reading and editing a written manuscript cannot proceed according to schedule, so there is a high possibility that I am simply a social misfit.

• As someone who wrote a chapter of “The Intellectual Production of Engineers” in a three-week iteration, I think “it doesn’t go according to schedule” is a thought-stopping cop-out. On the other hand, I once extended a deadline by a week, so I think that “it goes according to schedule” is also wrong. I think it’s a false dichotomy to say “writing goes according to schedule or it doesn’t.”
• One of the hardest causes of schedule disruption is “I originally planned to write one chapter, but when I wrote it, there are two or three chapters” or “I planned to write one chapter, but when I wrote it, there are only four pages”, but if you write out 100 sticky notes per chapter in advance, the volume of output will not be that much. If you write out 100 sticky notes per chapter in advance, the volume of the output will not vary that much.
• Instead of trying to perform the Vague Giant Task of “writing” as it is, writing first in a shallow, cursory style and then writing properly will increase the Estimate Probability of Success of the scale. - The approach of preventing poor estimation of scale with star shell of early prototyping.
• It is not that writing has unique circumstances, it is just that “intellectual production is difficult to estimate in advance” just like any other task. It is essentially the same as software development or research management. And “difficult” in “difficult to estimate” is not “impossible,” but “there is room for improvement through ingenuity.

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