In this article I want to share with you how I was able to create a whole course called "How To Build Your Own Principles Library" with very little effort using an idea called "Slow Burns." 

A funny morning

You definitely know you're Swiss when cleaning and making order is a relaxing activity. At 3 am this morning, my body told me: hey man we're rested. Time to get up.

I wasn't yet ready to do some hard mental work, so instead, I made some spring cleaning in the 36 Questions and Answers I have about Service Design Principles and turned it into an alpha version of a course called "How To Build Your Own Principles Library".

Slow burn

This funny morning reminded me this idea of working in slow burns instead of heavy lifts.

As Tiago Forte explains in an article called "The 10 Principles of Building a Second Brain" you can create valuable content with tiny steps that with time and patience become something bigger:

Stop completing your projects via “heavy lifts” – grueling slogs of painful work where you create everything from scratch. There is another way – you can slowly gather ideas, in the background and over time, using “slow burns.” Once the project gets underway, you’ll already have a rich collection of interesting ideas, insights, examples, facts, and illustrations that you can easily combine together without burning yourself out.

The advantages of small burns

In fact, for the course "How To Build Your Own Principles Library" I didn't really put much effort for working on it. Instead in the Service Design webinars I made in 2022 I covered a few questions. And over time I had 36 elements I could re-arrange to create something that would feel more like a course.
 
The advantage of this technic are:

1. It didn't feel like work

2. I can re-purpose content in multiple ways: once in a webinar, then re-use it in a library of Q&A and later in a course

What's next

And now that I've built a course with these 36 questions and answers I see which chapters I need to put focus on the next time I do a webinar. I've seen that the chapter called "Using your library" hasn't much content yet, so I'll try to develop it again with small burns through future webinars in the future.

Written by Daniele Catalanotto on Tuesday, December 13th, 2022