One step at a time
How to keep writing when the novelty wears off
Great engineering managers don’t just ship—they build organizations capable of shipping. But that meta-skill is rarely named, let alone taught.
Our book Engineering Manager’s Compass focuses on the unspoken rules of the role: how to read organizational structures, how to turn messy metrics into real decisions, and how to build teams that deliver without you holding everything together.
Writing a book is a bit like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It looks romantic from a distance. You imagine the view, the achievement, maybe even the story you will tell afterwards. But once you are on the mountain, the work is much less glamorous. You put one foot in front of the other. You deal with altitude, weather, tired legs, and the constant temptation to stop.
Writing is similar.
Having the right gear helps. Planning helps. We covered both in the previous articles:
But at some point the tools are ready, the outline exists, and the only thing left is the uncomfortable part:
You have to keep writing.
This article is about the mindset that helped us keep pushing the book forward when the novelty wore off.
Pick a point of reference
A book is too large to hold in your head all at once.
If you only think about the finished manuscript, the work quickly becomes intimidating. There are too many chapters, too many open questions, too many sections that still feel vague. The gap between where you are and where you want to be can become paralyzing.
What helped us was having a point of reference.
Not a perfect plan. Not a promise that the structure would never change. Just a clear enough direction to return to when we got lost.
For us, that point of reference was the kind of reader we wanted to help: aspiring and new engineering managers trying to make sense of the role. Whenever a chapter became too abstract, too broad, or too clever for its own good, we came back to that reader.
Would this help them make a better decision?
Would this make an invisible part of the job more explicit?
Would this be useful in practice, or only interesting in theory?
Those questions became our compass.
Find your octant
A compass tells you the direction. An octant helps you navigate when the exact path is unclear.
That distinction matters for writing, because you will rarely have complete certainty. Some chapters will change shape while you write them. Some ideas that felt strong in the outline will collapse once you try to explain them. Some sections will turn out to belong somewhere else entirely.
That is not failure. That is the work.
The goal is not to remove uncertainty before you start writing. The goal is to create enough orientation that uncertainty does not stop you.
In practice, this means keeping a few simple anchors visible:
Who is this for?
What problem are we helping them solve?
What should they understand or do differently after reading it?
How does this chapter connect to the rest of the book?
Whenever we felt stuck, we did not try to solve the whole book. We tried to answer these questions for the section in front of us.
That made the next step smaller.
Choose habit over goal
Goals are useful, but they are bad company on a difficult day.
“Write a book” is a goal. It is also too large to be helpful on a Tuesday evening when you are tired, your calendar was full, and the chapter you are working on still does not make sense. A habit is different.
A habit turns the question from “Will we finish the book?” into “What do we write today?” That smaller question is much easier to answer.
For us, progress came from making writing a regular activity rather than a heroic one. Some sessions were productive. Some were not. Some produced pages we kept. Others produced paragraphs we deleted the next day.
But the cadence mattered more than any individual session.
The uncomfortable part is that writing often feels inefficient. You can spend two hours producing something that later gets cut. That does not mean the time was wasted. The deleted paragraph may have been the thing that helped you understand what you actually wanted to say.
You are not only producing text. You are clarifying thought.
Keep writing, even when most of it will be thrown away
This is one of the hardest parts to accept.
Most writing does not survive in its first form.
You will throw away examples. You will rewrite introductions. You will move sections around. You will discover that a sentence you loved does not belong anywhere. That can feel painful, especially when time is scarce.
But keeping weak text because it was expensive to create is the writing version of the sunk cost fallacy.
The draft is not the product. The draft is the material.
Once we accepted that, writing became easier. We stopped expecting every session to produce publishable prose. Sometimes the output was only a rough argument. Sometimes it was a bad version of a good idea. Sometimes it was a list of questions we still had to answer.
All of that counted as progress, as long as it moved the work forward.
Remove friction
This is where tools matter again.
Not because tools will write the book for you, but because friction compounds. If opening the manuscript is annoying, if generating a preview is slow, if collaborating requires manual file juggling, every session starts with resistance.
And resistance is dangerous because writing already has enough of it.
The goal of the toolchain is not to be impressive. The goal is to make the next writing session easy to start.
For us, that meant keeping the workflow close to how we already work as engineers: plain text, version control, automation, and fast feedback loops. The fewer things we had to think about before writing, the more likely we were to actually write.
A good setup should make the right behavior boring:
open the project
write a section
preview the result
commit the change
continue later without wondering where things are
Nothing else should get in the way.
Use deadlines carefully
Deadlines are dangerous and useful for the same reason: they create pressure.
Without pressure, writing can expand forever. There is always another example to add, another sentence to polish, another chapter to rethink. If you are not careful, “not ready yet” becomes a permanent state.
This blog helped us create a useful kind of artificial deadline.
Publishing smaller pieces gave us a reason to finish slices of the work. It created presence, forced clarity, and gave us feedback before the entire book was done. That made the deadline a win-win: useful for the audience, and useful for us.
But the pressure has to be calibrated.
A deadline that forces progress is helpful. A deadline that forces you to publish something you no longer believe is not. The trick is to use deadlines to create movement, not panic.
Find a partner in crime
Writing alone is possible. Writing together made it more sustainable.
A partner creates accountability, but that is only part of the value. The bigger benefit is that they give you another mind to think with. They notice when an argument is unclear. They challenge examples that only make sense in your own head. They keep the work moving when your own energy drops.
For us, the partnership worked because we were not trying to protect every sentence. We were trying to make the book better.
That requires trust.
You need to be able to say, “This section does not work,” without turning it into a personal attack. You need to be able to cut your own favorite paragraph if it weakens the chapter. You need to care more about the reader than about being right.
A good writing partner does not make the work effortless. They make it harder to fool yourself.
Get feedback before you feel ready
Feedback is most useful before the work feels finished.
That is also when it is most uncomfortable.
If you wait until every chapter is polished, feedback becomes harder to accept. You have already invested too much in the current shape. Suggestions feel like threats. Structural problems become expensive.
Earlier feedback is cheaper.
It can tell you whether the argument lands, whether the reader gets lost, whether the example works, and whether the chapter solves a real problem. You do not need hundreds of readers for this. A few thoughtful people can already reveal patterns you would miss on your own.
The important part is to ask for the right kind of feedback:
What was clear?
Where did you slow down?
What felt missing?
What did you expect next?
What would make this more useful in your context?
Do not only ask whether people liked it. Liking is pleasant, but it is not always actionable.
Conclusion
Writing a book is daunting because it exposes the distance between what you think you know and what you can actually explain.
That distance is uncomfortable. It is also the point.
The way through is not one perfect tool, one perfect plan, or one burst of motivation. It is a system that helps you keep going: a clear point of reference, a regular cadence, low friction, useful deadlines, a trusted partner, and feedback before you feel ready.
In the end, the book moves forward the same way the climb does.
One step at a time.