Sometimes it's important to leave things deliberately imperfect as a reminder that perfection isn't what matters.

I've moved house.

That's why the pictures on this and the most recent 12-minute article look different to many of the previous 150 or so.

Well, that's part of why.

When I was exchanging messages with a colleague, Jamie Dru, he joked: hoping for a bit more variety on the photos for your posts now. He messaged me specifically a year or so ago when the photo on my weekly post was a view of a tree saying 'love the new artwork'. And I explained to him why the pictures are of what the pictures are.

But to explain it to you, we have to go back to the start.

When I started this writing practice more than six years ago, I already knew about Resistance.

I had already read The War of Art and applied the ideas to my coaching business, to all the things I was struggling with with it: sharing online about what I was doing and the new phase, making a website, and more.

I had seen it as I created a website about one of my favourite authors. There were so many strange ways I made it hard for my self. Including the mental knots I tied myself in that almost stopped me making the thing altogether, as Resistance had stopped me writing a book about my favourite computer game and creating a business to help people watch sport.

I had seen that in so many places my strange stories slowed me down and stopped me from doing what mattered.

One of the best ways I had found to deal with Resistance was to ruthlessly apply the 80/20 rule to everything I did. The idea is this: 20% of the effort I normally put into a task created 80% of the value of that task. Most of the remaining effort I normally put in created almost no value and so was, essentially, Resistance. So on each task I would think: what here is Resistance and how I can I stop doing that? What would doing just 20% look like.

With my website, almost all of it was Resistance. If I had a home page that said 'I'm a coach' and an email address, that was essentially the 80/20 analysis.

With the emails I was sending, I was wasting incredible amounts of time proofreading for typos. But, the first draft of the email created almost all of the value. Removing a typo added almost nothing to the email. Rewriting the final sentence 15 times helped the reader almost not at all.

And so when my coach and I designed what became this blog - The Train Series - I knew to be wary of Resistance. That's partly why we designed it as it was (and is): proof read just once, making small changes at most. But what else might be Resistance? What else might hold me back from creating these blogs and sharing them, from the practice that has changed my life and me as a person more than I could have possibly imagined?

Well, I'd seen with some other articles I'd written just how much time I could spend/lose/waste/pour into finding the 'right' picture.

That doesn't sound like the 20% to me. The 20% isn't in the picture, just like it isn't in the repeated proof-reading. It's in 'is there an article and have you shared it?' If there is and I have, I've got way more than 80% of the value.

And so when I designed this practice, I thought, I'm not going to faff with pictures. I'll just take a picture of the train I'm on. And that's what happens in many of the early articles in the series.

And then I stopped getting the train as much (and this became, of course, the 12-minute blog instead of the Train Series). And so I started taking pictures of wherever I was when I wrote the article. And most of them were written in our old flat in Battersea. A view of the south-west London skyline. Sometimes in the garden there, or under a tree in the car park (that's what got Jamie so excited). And now in my office on the Worcestershire/Warwickshire border in the West Midlands.

Jamie's not the only person who has suggested I do something better with the images over the years. My friend Fernando even gave me quite detailed instructions for how to apply some filters or similar to make the pictures look better.

I thought about that for quite a while. But then I decided that even though that would improve the blogs, might even get a few more people reading them, having the pictures as they are is a symbol.

Just like writing in 12 minutes is a symbol.

A symbol that some things are more important than looking pretty. That perfection, which isn't possible anyway.

Like, for example, have you done the work?

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Join me in December for an interactive workshop on applying ideas like the one in this article: How to Be More Productive (and why time management won’t help you)

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

The first three 12-Minute Method books are out now!

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