choose your next edit by improvement percentage

When you’re working on a product for your customers or a piece of work for your audience, it can be hard to know when to stop. You can fall into a perfectionist trap. 

I have found it helpful to ask myself: how much better is this change going to make the thing I’m working on? Am I embarking on a 10% or 1% or .1% improvement?

In your early drafts, it might be wise to ignore any changes below 5-10%. You need feedback on bigger, more fundamental parts of what you’re doing. The color of the drapes doesn’t matter much if you’re building the wrong floor plan.

In later drafts, when you’re closer to publication, you can zoom in on those 0.01-1% improvements. One way I can try to get to this estimate, back of the envelope, is thinking about what percentage of the audience will be actively delighted by the change I’m making (or actively dismayed by its absence). That’s the percentage improvement it represents. 

-eric