Today at 19:14, I finished my 3-day writing and editing sprint for the book Service Design Principles 201-300 😵 

During these three days, I've edited 100 Service Design Principles. My goal was to:

If we look at the numbers, in the first round of editing I did outside of this sprint, I was able to reduce, on average, the word count by 28%. During this sprint, I continued the effort and reduced the word count on average by 25%.

This shows that having multiple rounds of editing really helps. In fact, each time, I feel that "I can't remove more", but each time I still find things to edit.

I've also measured that each editing round takes me between 30 to 15 minutes per principle. Interestingly, I'm faster in the early morning than in the afternoon.

It feels good to have all the principles in the kanban section "Make smarter and fun". This means I just have to re-read all these 100 principles and add the humour that got lost in the editing and make sure I feel the content is smart enough. 

After that, the book will be sent to my friends at PaperTrue for the final and professional editing round 🍾

As you might know, I've decided to continue to develop the series of Service Design Principles. Therefore I already plan to publish this book at the end of 2022 and another one at the end of 2023 with 100 new Service Design Principles.

It's funny how I'm not used anymore to doing these kinds of writing sprints. Back in the day, I did it for full weeks to finish my first book in the series. Now, most of the editing is done in an effortless way a little bit daily. 

I think that next year I'll try to continue my transition to a daily editing mode instead of using multi-day sprints to do it.

Written by Daniele Catalanotto on Monday 31st of October 2022.