Twenty to midnight

It's twenty to midnight on a Tuesday and you're at the kitchen table with your laptop.

On the screen is a two-page summary for Thursday's team meeting. Your manager asked for it a week ago. "Just a couple of pages on where the supplier review has got to, so we're all looking at the same thing." You wrote it on Sunday afternoon. It took about two hours, and at the end of those two hours it said what needed saying.

Since then you've spent four evenings on it. You've rewritten the opening paragraph six times. You changed "significant" to "substantial" in the second section, and tonight you've changed it back. You rebuilt the table so the columns line up, then decided the table looked cramped and turned it into a list, and then turned it back into a table. You've read the whole thing aloud twice. An hour ago you found a sentence on page two that could be read two ways if someone were determined to misread it, and you've been working on that sentence ever since.

Your colleague Priya sent her summary round on Monday morning. It was a page and a half. The heading had a typing mistake in it, "Supplier reveiw", and one of her figures was labelled as provisional. By Monday afternoon three people had replied with comments, and your manager had written, "Thanks, really useful, let's spend ten minutes on this on Thursday." Nobody mentioned the heading.

You'll send yours at five to nine on Thursday morning, five minutes before the meeting. Nobody will have time to read it. It will be the better document of the two, by a small margin that only you can see. Priya's will be the one the meeting discusses, because hers is the one people have read.

None of this is a disaster. You're good at your job and people know it. But count what happened. A piece of work that was ready on Sunday went out on Thursday. It took about ten hours where two had been enough. You were short of sleep on Wednesday. And the thing the summary was for, which was to give people something to read before the meeting, didn't happen.

I'll use a few terms throughout. Polishing is work done on something after the point where the person receiving it could tell the difference. A pass is one more trip through the whole piece looking for things to fix. The wince is the small jolt you feel when you spot a flaw, or imagine someone else spotting it. The line is the point at which a piece of work does its job. Most of this book is about learning to see the line and to stop when you reach it.

Polishing has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

It starts after the work is usable. The hard part is done, and what remains are changes no reader would notice.

The changes go in circles. You put a word in, take it out, and put it back. A circle is a good sign that you've passed the line, because real improvements don't reverse.

You can't say what you're looking for. Ask yourself mid-pass what would have to be true for you to stop, and there's usually no answer. You're waiting for a feeling, and the feeling doesn't come.

And it's private. Nobody asked for the extra passes and nobody will know they happened. The ten hours won't appear anywhere except in your week.

I'd like you to try one thing before reading on. Think of the last three pieces of work you sent. They might be reports, emails, a presentation or a birthday card. For each one, estimate two times. When was it first good enough to do its job? When did you send it? Write down the gap for each. If the gaps are small, you may not have this habit, and you can put the book down with my blessing. If they're measured in days, read on.