Written in 2014, when Twitter allowed 140 characters and I decided to make that harder on purpose.
For a summer, I posted my tweets in haiku.
Three lines. Five syllables, then seven, then five. Seventeen in total. Partly an experiment, partly something to amuse myself with, and partly because I was curious what would happen if I made an already tight format considerably tighter.
What happened was that the posts got better.
Not more poetic — mostly they weren’t poetry in any serious sense. Better in the specific way that something gets better when you cannot include everything and have to decide what the point actually is.
Why the constraint helped
A 140-character limit already forces brevity. But brevity on its own doesn’t force clarity; it just produces compressed versions of vague thoughts. You can fit a great deal of nothing into 140 characters.
Seventeen syllables in a fixed pattern does something different. It removes the option of nearly saying what you mean. Every syllable is contested, so every word has to earn its place, and the ones that survive tend to be the ones carrying actual meaning.
The effort also went somewhere useful. Instead of “what should I post today” — an open question with infinite bad answers — the question became “how do I fit this into 5-7-5”, which is a puzzle with a solution. Puzzles are considerably easier to start than open questions.
This is the whole argument for constraints
The received wisdom is that creativity needs freedom. More budget, more time, fewer restrictions, and better work will follow.
It mostly doesn’t. Unlimited options produce paralysis and mush. The blank page is the hardest thing in any creative discipline precisely because nothing about it narrows the field.
Constraints do three things at once:
They make starting easier. A brief with boundaries can be attacked. A brief without them has to be invented first, and that invention is where most projects stall.
They force prioritisation. When you can’t have everything, you find out what you’d actually choose. That’s information you cannot get any other way — certainly not by asking.
They produce distinctiveness. Work made under unusual constraints looks unusual. Everyone with an unlimited budget arrives at roughly the same place, because unlimited budgets all point toward the same obvious solutions.
Your business already has constraints. Use them.
Here’s where this stops being about poetry.
Most small business owners spend a great deal of energy resenting their constraints, and treat them as the reason they can’t compete. Not enough budget. Not enough people. Not enough hours. Can’t afford the software the big firms use.
Those are real limits. They’re also the only reason you’d ever do anything differently from a competitor with ten times your resources — and doing things differently is the only way you beat them, because you certainly aren’t going to out-spend them.
- A small team means you can answer the phone yourself, which a large competitor structurally cannot. That’s not a shortfall, it’s the product.
- A narrow niche means you can know a market properly rather than serving everyone adequately.
- No marketing budget means you have to be genuinely worth talking about, which outlasts advertising.
- Limited hours means you must decide what matters, which most well-resourced businesses never do.
The question worth asking isn’t how do I remove this constraint. It’s what does this constraint make possible that wouldn’t be otherwise?
Imposing them deliberately
The more interesting move is adding constraints you don’t have to.
- Halve the deadline. Work expands to fill the time. A proposal that takes a week takes a day when it has to, and the difference in quality is frequently nil.
- Cut the offer list. If you sell eleven things, try describing your business as though you sold three. The exercise tells you which eight you’re keeping out of habit.
- Write the one-page version. Any strategy, plan or pitch that can’t survive being compressed to a page probably wasn’t clear at full length either.
- Ban the obvious answer. Whatever you’d normally do, rule it out for an hour and see what else exists. Most of the time you’ll return to the obvious answer, now knowing why.
The thing I actually took from it
The haiku experiment didn’t last past that summer. It was a game.
But it changed how I write, and how I think about briefs. When something isn’t working, my first instinct now is rarely to add — more words, more budget, more features, more time. It’s to take something away and see whether the problem was the abundance.
Usually it was.
Seventeen syllables.
Nothing survives that isn’t
doing real work here.
