Anne Lamott's Shitty First Drafts as a Goal-Setting Tool

“I’ll start the budget once I’ve researched the apps.” Picture that sentence said out loud in a kitchen, about a budget that does not exist in any form. Three weeks on, the research is thorough and the budget is still imaginary.

Anne Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts,” in her 1994 book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, is the cleanest fix for that kitchen sentence. Her claim, in her own words: “the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Perfectionism, in most goal work, is a sequencing mistake: you try to decide, plan and do well in one move, so the move never happens.

What does Lamott’s essay actually say?

It is about writing, and it is narrower than its reputation. Lamott describes the first draft as a child’s draft, where you let everything pour out, knowing no one will see it and that you can shape it later. The shaping comes in later drafts. Nothing in the essay tells you to ship the rough version, or says that rough is fine as a final answer.

That distinction matters, because the internet version is “just do it badly.” Lamott’s version is “do it badly first, in private, and then keep going.” The bad draft is a stage with a successor.

Why is perfectionism a sequencing problem?

Because three jobs get fused into one. Deciding what you want, planning how, and doing a good version are separate tasks with different skills, and attempting all of them in one sitting makes the first move enormous. A big first move gets postponed. If you want the longer argument that perfectionism is mostly avoidance, that post makes it; the angle here is narrower and mechanical. Pull the jobs apart and the first one becomes small enough to do on a Tuesday.

What does a 20-minute bad-draft pass look like?

An illustration, not a case study: imagine someone who wants a gym plan and has spent a month reading programs. The rules for the pass:

1. Set a timer for 20 minutes and write “draft 1” at the top.
2. Produce the whole artifact, start to finish, at low quality. A full ugly plan beats a polished first half.
3. Leave holes marked ”???” instead of stopping to resolve them.
4. Stop at the buzzer, even mid-sentence.

At minute twenty our imaginary person has: three days a week, a guess at exercises copied from memory, ”???” next to what to do on days they travel, and no idea if the weights are right. That is a terrible plan. It is also the first plan that exists, and for the first time there is something to react to. Editing a plan takes ten minutes of judgment. Inventing one from nothing takes a month of dread.

The same shape works for the budget (list every payment you can remember, guess the rest) or an email to a friend you have neglected (“Hi, I’m bad at this, I’ve missed you, here is what’s been going on”). Draft the terrible version, then decide what to do with it.

Where is “just do a bad draft” overrated?

Three places, and Lamott does not claim otherwise.

• Irreversible, high-stakes decisions. A bad draft of a resignation letter is fine. A bad draft of resigning is not. Draft the analysis; do not draft the act.
• Safety. Nobody should rough-draft a medication schedule, a load calculation or a climbing anchor. Where errors injure people, you need checking, not speed.
• Work that is already shaped. If you know exactly what to do and are simply avoiding it, you do not need a draft, you need to do the thing. The technique helps when the obstacle is a blank page.

There is a quieter failure too: the bad draft that never gets a second pass. If draft 1 sits in a folder forever, you have converted perfectionism into a pile of unfinished files. The rule is a revision date, written down before you close the document.

How does this fit with the other tools?

Lamott’s idea sits next to Ira Glass’s observation that your taste outruns your skill early on; the taste gap explains why the draft feels so bad, and the bad draft is how you start closing it. For an overwhelmed week, Osler’s day-tight compartments tell you where to put the draft so it does not bleed into everything else. And if the real obstacle is that you will not begin the day at all, a two-minute morning decision is the same move at smaller scale.

Mornings are one place to try it. An alarm that makes you record a video for friends, which is what DontSnooze does on iOS, is a crude draft of a better morning: ugly, unshowered, and still counted.

Starting badly also works as a way to try new things generally; seven first-time experiments borrowed from Zen’s beginner’s mind each come with a one-line rule for doing the first attempt imperfectly.

What should you do with the draft afterward?

Put the revision on a calendar. Tomorrow, give it ten minutes of editing and cut one thing. The day after, show it to one person. You are not hunting for perfect; you are making each pass slightly less bad than the last, which is exactly what Lamott’s later drafts are for.

The budget from that imagined kitchen takes twenty minutes. Most of it will be wrong. It will also be open on the screen, with a column of real numbers, which is more than three weeks of research ever produced.