Robin Rendle on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing:
Perhaps the strangest thing about this book is that it isn’t just writing advice, as I kept thinking about how these suggestions can be applied to design work, too. For example: when working on a big design project I never work on the whole thing all at once. At the beginning I’ll focus on the smallest part of it: the sidebar, the navigation, a single button or action or feature. I think of these as “sentences” or what I once called the smallest possible bit. Each change in the design modifies all the other changes. So I’ll constantly revise my prototypes as if I’m a brutal editor, demanding revision after revision, but because I’m working on a small piece of the puzzle it’s much less intimidating.
It is an art, to both practice this meditative focus on small pieces and wield an active understanding of the flow of the whole.