The old saying is that no one likes writing, but everyone likes having written. That’s from Dorothy Parker, the sage of the Algonquin Round Table.

There’s no doubt. You start writing and what do you want? To be finished.

Add that to today’s punchlist/task-oriented life…where we have “widgets” we need to move (David Allen) and life is about getting things off your list (ie being productive, measurable)…and you can turn your creative work into a human assembly line

Whereas we probably would be a lot more effective if we were at least a little bit of an artisan. More a master woodworker.

It definitely matters. We’re competing with a lot of noise in a world that doesn’t trust anyone and we need to be signal, not noise.

In which case, I suggest there’s one more item we need to add to our task list: revision.

I’ve run across a couple of examples of this recently. The first was when I was reading a book about the making of the film In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s an excellent film, which was adapted from an excellent play, that had been evolving since Miranda was a college student.

It was, in fact, a Tony-Award winning musical.

So, when it comes to a film, you’d expect the film to follow pretty close to the stage play, right back to college.

Except that isn’t what happened. Miranda reports that “five notes” have survived, going back to the original story. Even from Broadway to film, the story was revised in significant ways.

You can tell revision was on Miranda’s to-do list. And the results reflect it. You take a Tony-Award winning play and you’re still revising it? That’s how you get that kind of success—continually questioning and re-thinking and revising and collaborating.

Your boss might have said, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The other is from The Economist, which sends out an email every weekend detailing the process it uses to come up with its cover design for that week. The Economist covers are actually a perfect example of a challenge we all face every day in our communication roles: communicating a complex idea in a simple, engaging, and attractive way. They want you to buy the magazine. I want you to read the content.

The Economist transparently lets you see the process, often starting with pencil sketches and then showing several draft covers that represent different approaches, followed by the selection of one approach and then further refinements to color and tone. The whole thing is annotated with notes from the editor on what they were thinking.

A few commonalities I have noted after reading several dozen of these:

• The first idea never survives.

• The problem is sometimes solved by something that the artist sees from the window of the bus on the way home.

• Sometimes a small change makes a big difference (see the color change above)

• The concept needs to be accessible to people. Striking the balance between accessibility and uninteresting/obvious is a constant challenge.

• In fact, most of the choices boil down to balance: subtle but not obvious. Alarming but not fear-mongering. Subtle but not obtuse. Strategic hyperbole but not cartoony. This alone will put any communicator to the test.

• Leave something “rhetorically…in the tank.” When you are making a point, think about where you would go if the situation got worse…or better.

None of these could happen if the cover was “banged out.”

I know—you don’t have time. You probably have to go to a meeting about why people don’t read your internal newsletter.

The cover comes out every week. If we want differentiated content, we need a differentiated approach. Which means revising and re-thinking belong on the to-do list.