I announced that I was writing (or trying to write) a book in November about our experience running the Indeed Incubator over the last 4+ years. (For the uninitiated, the Incubator is our new product innovation group at Indeed. Think of it as an internal venture capital program.) I wanted to give a quick update on that experience. I didn’t end up writing every single day. In fact most days I capped out just a bit over the needed 1,667 words. I missed the 50,000-word target but I did get about half that down on paper (screen?).

Where’s the book, bro?

It’s not in a place where it can be shared yet, sorry. However, having this much down has given me the confidence to share with others close to me about my intention to finish this project. I’ve even had several people volunteer to read the pre-release book when it’s ready. I haven’t even started figuring out whether I’ll self-publish or look for a traditional publisher to help get this out there. I still have quite a bit more work to do to get this ready for publication anyways. Even if I never make a dime off this project, the act of capturing many of our learnings in one place has been incredible. I fully expect this will be a very valuable resource for our team members. It will really help them understand exactly what it is that we do at Indeed.

A little Christmas present – tips from my November writing excursion

Rather than making this a boring update blog post with no value for you, I also wanted to give you a few (recently learned) tips in case you’ve ever thought about writing. I’m by no means an expert, so take these with a grain of salt.

1. Planning is invaluable. My preparation in October was just jotting down various notes and topics I might want to capture into a book. Having that made writing in November just a matter of fleshing things out and arranging them in a sensible order.
2. Setting aside time was key. I tried to write in the evenings after my kids were in bed before my own bedtime or before spending quality time with my wife. This worked so-so. There are a lot of distractions in the evenings. Unfortunately no matter how much I tried I could not rally my brain to write in the mornings. Find a time that works, and be semi-consistent.
3. A quality tool matters. It took me a bit of time to learn how Scrivener works. However, after a quick tutorial and picking a reasonable template, I was able to use it quite effectively.
4. Just write – edit later. I think this tip came from my high-school language arts class. Unfortnately for me in this situation that was the last time I took a class specifically on writing. The core is simple. Don’t worry a ton about sentence structure or grammar. Just get the thoughts down. I ended up accidentally writing one whole chapter in more of a memoir format instead of the typical business book approach, so that will have to be edited, but the good news is that the chapter is captured.

New Goal!

I’m looking forward to sharing this with the world. For now, I’ve got to get a bit more written before it would make sense. My new goal is to get the shitty-first draft complete by the end of January. We’ll see how that goes, 2022 is looking to be another year of great change! Happy New Year to you all!