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Fantastic advice from @bama-rose .

My productivity increased when I started setting deadlines for myself.

If I have eight total hours to edit this draft, then I sit down, start my timer, and work at it for however long. When I’m done with a session, I log my time in a spreadsheet. When that time adds up to eight hours, I’m done with that draft and it’s time to work on something else.

It turned my mindset from perfecting one chapter at a time (which is a terrible workflow for most people and may or may not result in tearing your hair out later when you learn something new or make a stylistic change which requires you to re-perfect all those previous chapters) to iterative editing where I pass over the whole draft in a short period of time, performing a few closely related edits across the whole manuscript.

Experimenting, failing, seeing the result of a final project helps more than rewriting the same book for five years. I know, I’ve done both.

“Perfect” is the enemy of “good enough.”