As I come to the end of many projects and prepare to start another, I want to share one of biggest regrets. Scope is hard to manage. I've grown enough to make sure projects are finished, but I'm still working on making them good. How do you budget for delays, mistakes, and polish?

With some wonderful advice from Write, Publish, Repeat (affiliate link) I am moving to a three draft system. I quite like it so far. Maybe you will, too. Budget time to make your project three times, instead of once. This may mean a smaller scope, but you will get a better result.

Draft 1: Make It Real

It's easy to have ideas. If you've ever been called "creative", you're full of them. A few might even be good! But ideas aren't a useful form to anyone else. We have to convert them into something physical. This is the hardest part.

Whether it's written, typed, coded, or recorded, you have one job: get it on paper, as much and as fast as you can, by any means necessary. It's okay if it's terrible. If it helps, require it. This overcomes the static friction of getting started. Any material form is enough to start getting feedback, from others and yourself!

Draft 2: Make it Finished

Now it's time to make it complete. Your first draft is riddled with obvious broad-stroke errors and blanks for details. Your job now is to pave it over. Make a complete, full-detail pass written to an acceptable "finished" quality. Make changes where they need to be made. Your prose should be readable. Your art should be rendered. Your code should be complete and functional.

Your work does not, however, have to be perfect. If you find yourself freezing from perfectionism, set that part of your project aside. Settle on a quick solution: not leaving it blank, but a quick and bad answer. Your work does not need to meet your own wonderful standards. It just needs to reach a lowest-common denominator level that someone might publish.

Draft 3: Make it Good

Now it's time to shine. Sand and polish. Now is the time to fuss over word choice, or lighting, or optimization. Now, you get to play for style points. Play to your strengths. Make your work enough to make you proud.

Keep in mind, however, this phase is also a sprint: this is a test of your current skill ceiling, your instincts. Be aware of what your best is, for now. If you do not know how to improve something, that is okay. Make a note of it. You can always take some time practicing on other projects and make an updated version of this one later. Fans of your original will be happy to see it.

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