Squaring the circle

There is a central problem at the heart of many of the difficulties I've had with creative work. It's behind my recent writing failure and many older ones as well, but it's also something that's been affecting my prototypes and even larger projects. I touched on related things in The idea triangle, Two kinds of perfect, and Continuous everywhere. This problem sits somewhere near all of these ideas, but I think it's distinct, and particularly important. Here it is:

You can control how good something is, or you can control how long it takes, but you can't control both.

This might seem obvious. Certainly, it seems obvious to me now, but it didn't seem that way before. Sure, we pay lip service to the idea, but think about what happens during a standard top-down project. You figure out what you need to do, break that down into small parts, estimate all the parts, then start working. But what about when your estimates turn out to be wrong, more work appears, the requirements change, and all the other things that happen in every project? Well, one of those two things is going to have to go. Either you can't have it when you wanted it, or you can but it won't be as good.

Agile is all about this second path; it controls how long things take, but not how good they are. By aiming to repeatedly approximate the final product, the idea is that when you inevitably have to make that choice, you will be partway up a smooth curve of doneness over time. By contrast, waterfall-style projects are often not useful at all until they are completely finished. Faced with that situation, you have no choice but to accept however long it will take.

Both of these options work fine in theory, but in practice they both fall to impossible expectations. Nobody's happy with a project that goes massively over time and budget, even if that's how long it always would have taken. And nobody's happy (despite the claims of Agile fans) with a project that doesn't do everything it was intended to, even if it's on time. If you turn around to a client who wanted 5 features and say "well we got 4 of them", that client will turn back and say "so go do the 5th one!" What people want is a project that does everything they asked for while also taking the amount of time they want. Which is too bad, because they can't have that.

Of course, some projects work out complete and on time, which really only happens if the time was accurately determined from the desired quality. If you have a reliable estimation procedure and you trust the numbers, then you won't need to control how long it takes; you just accept the estimated time as a fact. Unfortunately, as in The idea triangle, you can only make an accurate estimate for an uninteresting problem. If your problem is identical to one you've solved before then you know how long it takes, but as soon as you have novelty, creativity or improvisation, your time or quality are going to get blown out somewhere.

So creative work, the kind I like doing, suffers the most from this problem. There are many reasons I aim to build regular productive habits, for raw material, as a motivational trick, and as a way of training my associative self. But these habits often break down, especially when I have other things going on. Framed in the light of this observation, the reason is obvious: a habit requires something to be done by a certain time.

Unfortunately, squared against that is a love of quality, and a tendency to jump at opportunities, whether or not they're within my current context. In fact, I think a large part of what I find appealing about creative work is the ability to make space for these chance thoughts and follow them wherever they lead.

But these two things can't coexist. At some point during a prototype, during a writing session, during any kind of project, that voice will come to me and say "psst, hey, I've got an idea that will make this thing way better". If I say yes, I am choosing quality over time. If I say no, I am choosing time over quality. But I don't want to choose, I want both. So I take the idea and pretend that it won't take longer. When it does I take that time from somewhere else or make a new plan that includes it.

The issue isn't that I would make this choice and then regret it, but rather that I didn't realise I was making a choice at all. Instead, I was unintentionally adding these extra conditions and thereby putting myself in an unsolvable situation. I somehow ended up being the bozo in the room asking for impossible and incompatible things and trying to will myself through the air despite no available physics indicating that I could.

So I resolve to take this lesson to heart. Some things I want done by a certain time, and for them I must be prepared to sacrifice quality, to say no to opportunity, and accept whatever outcome the time allows. Some things I want to be good, to have that essential sense of quality that I find beautiful and motivating. Those things will take time. How much time? I don't know, but whatever it is I must accept it.