Four Writing Lessons from Dan Charnas’ Work Clean

I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The re-read is where I slow down and take notes, reworking ideas and responses as I figure out how to make best use of what I’ve learned.

And I will admit, this post started with a what-can-learn-that-will-be-useful-as-a-writer post, because most things do, in my head. I gathered up my notes, started putting them in shape. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. “Just find the writing angle.”

There are lots of writing angles in Work Clean. It’s a book about understanding time, as much as offering a business process, and it tipped the notion of the most productive thing I can be doing right now on its head.

Then I noticed that the stuff I really focused on wasn’t just useful in writing. The mindset seeped over into other parts of my life, and made things like putting together a PhD application, cleaning my apartment, and processing my ridiculous to-do list a little cleaner and easier than they were.

With that in mind, this is a kinda-writing-focused, but kinda not list of the four most useful things I picked up in Work Clean. They’re aren’t all the book has to offer, by a long shot, and may not be applicable to every writers process, but they’re definitely the things that were most important to me.

LESSON ONE: MOVE NOW

Charnas spends a lot of time talking about motion and action in his book, particularly as it relates to the notion of mise-en-place at the core of what he’s contemplating.

The thing he talked about which literally got me off my ass and doing something important was the notion that the action you take right now is infinitely more valuable than the action you might take in the future.

The logic here is simple: the thing you do right now has more impact, because the reactions to your action have more time to perpetuate. Acting now also relieves the psychological pressure of inaction, potentially freeing up more time afterwards because you’re not longer crippled by indecision.

I’ve used a similar approach to this, from time to time, when group decisions stall – suggest the obvious wrong answer, even if it’s dumb, because it will give everyone else something to work against and every other idea seems better after yours. You know, I think McDonalds for lunch is a terrible idea, but I do kinda feel like Thai…

I sure as hell use this for writing, where throwing out a scene that is obviously wrong will frequently show me where I can do things right.

When in doubt, move now. Now is the most valuable time you’ve got. If you haven’t started that project yet, get the first words down.

LESSON TWO: LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROGRESS WORK AND IMMERSIVE WORK

This one was a real eye-opener for me, and it got a whole bunch of things moving that had been stalled for a number of weeks. Simply put, Charnas divides everything into two categories: Immersive Work, which requires you to be hands-on for long periods of time, and Process Work, where time spent doing the work unlocks the potential for other people to do work on your behalf.

Both type of work are valuable and necessary to run your life, but failure to put some focus on Process Work turns you into a bottleneck in a process. Other things cannot happen when you do not do your part, even if they are things that are beneficial to you.

This is a big one for writers, because we tend to embrace the immersive work of writing, and treat it as significantly more important than the process work. The moment I read this section of work clean I went to my email and found a whole bunch of points where that mindset was, effectively, screwing me.

I had page proofs that I was putting off, because they weren’t as much fun as writing, even though doing those proofs would allow other people to get the story out there in front of people.

I had a short-story contract I was putting off signing because it needed me to do a two-hundred word about-the-story piece to go along with it, and spending two hundred words on that seemed like a less valuable use of my sparse writing time than getting it done and signing the contract so the magazine in question can schedule my story, get me paid, and put my work in front of new readers.

I had a short-list of tasks that needed doing for an application to go back to university, which I was putting off because they were required some digging for information and unfamiliar writing, even though doing those things would allow other people to start working on my behalf to get the application processed.

Suddenly, the best way of using my time got re-contextualised really, really quickly. Writing new words is always going to be important – and hands-on work is always more exciting than the process work – but letting the process stuff build up just made it seem insurmountable.

Focusing on how do I get others working for me is an interesting mindset to adopt, as a writer, given that we usually think of ourselves as solitary types. But there is a lot of small tasks that do exactly that, and it getting them done feels…oddly freeing.

LESSON THREE: CULTIVATE A DELIVERY MINDSET

If you’re a customer in a restaurant and you’re starving, it doesn’t really matter whether your meal is ten percent done or ninety percent done. From your point of view, it is simply not done and your hunger is making you irritable.

If you’re the chef and your customers are waiting, you want to get something in front of them and get them eating. When things go wrong and your getting slammed, the most valuable use of your time is the tasks that gets things unstuck and your customer’s full.

It’s a useful metaphor, if you’re a writer. Particularly if you’re a writer who accumulates new projects at speed, works constantly, but never seems to finish. I have a particular weakness for getting stuck on a project, cutting over to something else, and leaving the first project fallow for a few months.

Now, I’ve narrowed my focus to the stories that will be a) easy to finish, and b) meet the highest expectation of quality I can manage. This combination gives me a useful framework for figuring out what’s the best thing to work on next, and buys me the time I need to get unblocked on a bunch of longer projects.

LESSON FOUR: SLOW DOWN TO GET FASTER

After a few years of trying to work at break-neck space, it feels very weird to read something that says slow down and focus on quality and think, yes, that’s exactly what I need to do.

But there’s a simple logic to Charnas description of kitchen work: your shit goes out perfect, or it does not go out. A dish that’s made fast but doesn’t meet the standards of your restaurant doesn’t save you time – it’s just work that needs to be done over again.

Precision matters more than speed. Writing five hundred words a day and getting a cleaner first draft may end up saving me time over writing a rougher, uglier thousand words every morning.

Not advice that will work for every writer, given our love of rough drafts and revision, but it’s something I’m willing to try, especially with RescueTime giving me detailed stats on just how long I’m spending on redrafts on things written during my attempt at 600k year.