Marginal Gains and Writing, Part I
Compound Your Writing to Earn Word Dividends
I’ve fallen marginally behind in my reading goal for the year—get it? Marginally? In this case I mean I’m just a little bit behind. I’m 71 percent through my reading goal but we’re through 77 percent of the year so I’m starting to sweat just a little. I haven’t met my reading goal in many years now because I have trouble making myself sit down and read sometimes, no matter how much I am enjoying a book.
I hatched a really smart plan (even for me) to catch up by doubling down, splitting my reading stream into two and listening to some of the audio books I accumulated when I used to have an Audible account. I’ve been walking the dog about an hour to 90 minutes a day so I should be able to knock a couple of audio books out quickly and get back on track. We’re multitasking (by “we” I mean “me and the dog”).
Many of the audio books in my Audible library were purchased to listen to on road trips but then I never actually listened to them on the road trips I bought them for because you’d never guess this but I can talk for an entire road trip without stopping.
What I’m getting around to explaining is, one of those audio books is Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I suspect I bought for a road trip with my brother because, first, that’s the kind of thing he’d be into and, second, James Clear is like a former sports guy and it’s full of sports metaphors and anecdotes.
One of those sports anecdotes is about the British cycling team. Mark that down as another thing I learned from this book: Cycling is, apparently, a team sport. I won’t tell the whole long story but will summarize it here and encourage you to read the excerpt from Atomic Habits on Clear’s site. In summary, the British cycling team was really bad and then they brought in a coach—Dave Brailsford—who broke cycling down into its component parts and found ways to make tiny improvements in each of those component parts. Tiny improvements across dozens of different components of bicycling added up to a huge improvement in the team’s performance once everything was rolled back up and the Brits went on to dominate cycling for a while.
That’s the idea. Do go read that excerpt if you have time, it has a neat graphic that I will reference later. Also consider getting the audio book if you listen to audio books; it’s not very long and the author is a good narrator. I’m a big fan of habits and the science of habit-forming, as you may know, having written about them in Little Habit Tracker That Could and Five Writing Habits to Cultivate.
While this idea of marginal improvements or marginal gains is closely associated with sports performance, when I look for more information on it (on the Internet) I find the concept applied to a lot of other areas, particularly in business and finance. Obviously, small gains that compound is a big component of finance; that’s not news to anybody. But there are a lot of articles on how to take marginal gains theory and apply it to whatever it is you do.
So, I thought—no, we can skip that part. You already know. Let’s spend the rest of today’s Shelf Life talking about marginal gains and writing: How can you break writing down to its component parts, find ways to improve those component parts, and then improve each one a teeny, tiny bit? And what about compounding marginal gains over time? Because this is too much to cover in 2,750 words (or fewer), I’ve broken this topic down into two parts. Make sure you check back on Thursday for the component parts of writing and ways to incrementally improve them.
Today, I’ll kick it off with compounding gains because I try to get all the math I have to do for the week out of the way as early as possible. I used a calculator and an Excel spreadsheet to help with the math in today’s article but if it’s wrong please let me know.
If you refer back to the James Clear article I linked above, you can see his graphic that illustrates what it looks like if you improve by 1 percent each day for 365 days (1.01 to the 365th power) versus if your skill or ability in something becomes worse by 1 percent each day for 365 days (0.99 to the 365th power). If you do 1 percent better or more each day, by the end of the year you’ll have accumulated a 37.7 percent gain. If you do 1 percent less or worse each day, by the end of the year you’ll have atrophied to almost nothing.
Now: Creative writing is not like a muscle. I don’t believe writing skill necessarily atrophies if you don’t use it constantly. Neglecting your writing isn’t like neglecting your gym routine. No matter how long you wait before picking up writing again, I don’t think you will find yourself back at square one. The lessons you learn when you write stay with you; they don’t disintegrate with time.
Also: Writing skill can improve even when you are not, yourself, writing. You can improve your writing skill by studying writing, by reading, by critiquing or editing others’ writing, and so on. Therefore, I will not say “if you don’t practice writing you’re not getting better at it!” because you may be.
In any case, let’s look at some different ways we can apply this 1-percent increase idea to writing.
Word count is my personal favorite metric of writing because it is the great equalizer. I learned this working in publishing. Quantifying word work by the page or, worse, the hour, is too slippery to get good data. What takes one person 15 minutes to write or edit may take another 3 hours. The amount of content on “a page” is all over the place due to differences in display settings (or handwriting size). That’s why I look to word count whenever I quantify this type of work.
What’s a good quantity of words, then, to aim for in a writing session? And how often to sit down to a writing session? Let’s say your goal is to write three days a week; that’s 156 writing sessions per year. And let’s use 500 words as our other variable, because it’s a nice round number and a very reasonable number of words for a session. Especially if you’re not editing as you go, which, if it slows you down, do not do that.
If 500 words in a writing session, three times per week, sounds reasonable—consider what happens if we incrementally increase the word count by 1 percent each session.
First, if you write 500 words (without incrementally increasing) during each of 156 writing sessions, you’ll finish the year with 78,000 words. That’s a whole novel. To put that in perspective for you, that’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. That’s actually a really productive writing year for almost anyone. I’m not trying to put that down. Anyone who does that has accomplished something huge.
But: Let’s say you write 500 words in your first writing session and then incrementally increase your word count by 1 percent each session thereafter. At the end of the year you would have a whopping 186,105 words. That’s three normal-size novels or, again to put things in perspective, that’s The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien.
Maybe I’m playing a trick on you though. Maybe this is like that old thought experiment where you ask for only a penny for your salary but for it to be doubled each day, like any HR department in the world would allow that, and on day 30 you make 5 million dollars. Maybe on writing session 156 you have to write an impossible number of words.
No trick. If you increase your word count by just 1 percent each time you write, you’ll write 2,361 words during your last session. That may sound like a lot but it’s a very reasonable amount to write if you practice all the time. I knock out two Shelf Lifes a week and they average 2,211 words apiece. And that’s only my Shelf Life–related writing.
Next let’s look at writing time. Time is a bigger challenge because not everybody has the same amount to work with no matter how many people say “we all have the same 24 hours in a day.” No we don’t. That’s ridiculous. I have no commute and no kids to take care of so I already have hours more free time daily than someone whose life is otherwise similar to mine but has both. Therefore, I want to be cautious in my prognostication, like “oh if you add just 1 percent to that time each day soon you’ll be writing three hours a day!” Lots of people don’t have three hours a day to write. Probably most people. I don’t, and like I said I already have more free time than most.
I’ll start with 10 minutes. You write for 10 minutes and you write three days per week—10 minutes each session. At the end of the year you’ll have spent 1,560 minutes, or 26 hours, writing. If you work an 8-hour day, that boils down to three work days plus two hours of writing time over the course of the year.
What happens if you write 10 minutes on day one and then increase your time by 1 percent each session? Well, for your final session you’ll write for 47 minutes—almost 5 times the duration of your first writing session. What’s more, you wrote for a total of 3,772 minutes over the course of 156 writing sessions—62 hours. If you work an 8-hour day, that’s more than work week and a half.
One more scenario: What if you write every weekday instead of three days per week? What if you start with 10 minutes and increase each session’s duration by 1 percent, but instead of 156 writing sessions you have 260?
Thanks to the nature of compounding, the more times you compound the steeper the curve you get. Refer back to James Clear’s graphic to see that illustrated. If you began on January 1, 2022, with a 10-minute writing session and wrote 1 percent longer each weekday, you’d be looking at a 132-minute writing session on December 30, 2022—hopefully you have New Year’s Eve off work. You also more than double your total time spent writing versus writing three times per week—almost 205 hours in total. That’s five weeks at your full-time job.
The key to compound gains is that you build up your tolerance slowly to whatever it is you’re doing. In the final scenario (260 writing session), the first week you write just 10 minutes each day. On day one you write for 600 seconds, day two for 606 seconds—on day five you’re just writing for 624 seconds. Ten minutes and not-even-a-half. How many extra words might you get in those 24 seconds? Twenty-four seconds is nothing. You won’t even notice 24 seconds. Each increase is so small you can barely notice it compared with the day before. By day 260 you’re writing for 7,896 seconds (132 minutes), which sounds huge, but on day 259 you wrote 7,817 seconds. That’s only 79 seconds longer than the day before. Not even a minute and a half.
You can do an extra minute-and-a-half—right?
Coming up Thursday: The second half of this two-parter on marginal gains for writing.
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