First draft of the first quarter of my next book done!

For the 5th book in the series Service Design Principles I've decided to work in quarters. From time to time, I stop and review the progress I've already made and take a day or two to finish the next quarter of the book.

Today I've finished the first 25 principles from this new book that will share 100 tiny ideas, tips and principles to help people better serve humans and the planet that hosts them.

Why I'm writing in quarters?

Each book I write in this series is written in a new season of life. And usually that means that the writing process also looks a bit different so that it doesn't mess up my life completly.

For this season, I'm a bit exhausted by the finishing marathon I had to do last time. Checking the proofreading of 100 principles at once and doing all the references checks for it all at once at the end was painful.

So now I'm forcing myself to stop after 25 principles to do these things:

• Import the content all in the Pages document that will be used to make the ebook

• Reduce each principle so that it fits the layout

• Add all the references and make sure that they are done with a custom short link that I can change if the link is dead in the future, and also make sure I have a PDF archive of that website in case it totally vanishes from planet earth (that's one of the most boring tasks)

• Link back to the conversations I had with experts that inspired some of the principles. And not just linking to the whole conversation but to the specific section of the conversation where we speak about that idea.

• Organize the proofreading for that quarter, so that it's less exhausting to go over all the corrections

So a lot of no-fun work but that it is important to have a book that people can actually enjoy reading.

The goal for me is not to do all of this at once, but slowly but surely over weeks and months, and then from time to time give myself a day or two of focus where I finish a quarter of the book. So it's a nice mix of slow lifts during weeks and months and then a tiny marathon to finish a quarter.

Instead of having a huge marathon of no-fun tasks to do at the end of the writing.

A bit of pain throughout the year instead of all at the end, works better for this season of life were I'm a bit more tired.

Thank you!

A big thank you to Haley Anderson, Joel Hügli, Samuel Huber and Igor Jimenez who inspired a lot this quarter of the book.

You can get a preview

If you want access to the first 8 Service Design principles from this new book you can join the waitlist and you'll get automatically the PDF and each week in your inbox the new Q&A.