Sending bad work back to yourself

The single most useful review process I have ever adopted is to send my own work back to myself, two days later, as if I had received it from somebody else.

The mechanic is simple. The work, whatever it is, gets finished on Tuesday. On Tuesday it goes into a draft folder. On Thursday morning, before opening any other email, I open the draft and look at it as a stranger would. I write down the first three things I notice. The first three things, almost always, are the three things that are wrong with the work.

This sounds obvious, written down. In practice it is the discipline I see designers least often manage to keep.

A few small operational notes that have made it work for me, where previous attempts at the same idea did not.

The two-day gap is important. One day is not enough. Three days is too many; the work has cooled past the point where you remember what you were doing. Two days is the right interval for almost everything I make.

The first three things are important. Not “the things I think need fixing”, which is a different prompt and produces a different list. The first three things you notice are usually the things a real reader would notice. The fourth and beyond is usually you trying to be helpful.

Writing them down is important. Reading them back into the work without writing them down loses two of the three. I keep a single sheet of paper, on the wall by the desk, where these notes go. The notes from this week are at the top. Last week’s are below. The page accumulates.

Resist the temptation to fix as you go. The whole point of the review is that you are reading, not making. Make the list, then close the file. Open it again that afternoon and act on the list.

This is, in effect, a one-person version of a peer review. It is not as good as a peer review with an actual peer. But for the work that is too small or too quiet or too personal to put in front of another designer, it is, in my experience, the closest thing.

For more rigorous treatments of the same idea: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird covers it for writing, with the “shitty first drafts” chapter being the relevant one. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing covers it for sentence-level review. Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work approaches it from the discipline of publishing in stages.

The studios I respect most do something like this, formally or informally. The studios that do not, ship work that the studio is the only audience for, because nobody else has been in the room.