If you’re a semi-regular here, you’re acutely aware that there’s no formal writing process to these somewhat sporadic posts. I try to provide some practical personal finance information based on my own experiences, but more and more Impersonal Finances simply functions as a very personal financial diary of sorts for yours truly. That’s kind of the joke. And it’s rare that you’ll read something–here or elsewhere–that immediately resonates with this cross section of both writing and managing personal finances. But I recently came across an article that carries some exceptional advice for writers, savers, and just plain old doers of anything at all.

Advice for new writers and new savers

This piece of advice comes from a recent New Yorker interview with one of the original writers of “The Simpsons,” John Swartzwelder. The author asked the notoriously private Swartzwelder how much time he spent on writing scripts, and his answer is genius in its simplicity:

All of my time and all of my attention. It’s the only way I know how to write, darn it. But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

As this advice pertains to writing, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Writing can be brutally impossible. But all there really is to it is just slapping a bunch of sentences together. Once that’s done, all you have to do is improve upon that existing product. Which is really quite easy.

What does this have to do with money?

This being Impersonal Finances, we can easily relate that sentiment to money just as well as writing. Similar to writing, getting your personal finances in order can seem a monumental task. The most daunting part of both writing and saving/investing money is often exactly the same for both endeavors: you don’t know where to start.

You might have some information that belongs somewhere in your financial plan along the way, but you’re not quite sure where it fits in. So how do you put those fragmented bits of knowledge in the proper place? The answer is that you just put them anywhere. Who cares!? The order doesn’t matter. Structure doesn’t matter. Doing something–anything–matters. Start applying what you do know, and you’ll give yourself a canvas to re-paint with what you learn along the way. By taking that first step–maybe cutting out an unwanted recurring expense or automating a bill payment or 401k investment–you’re filling a previously blank page with the makings of your own personal finance episode. Once you get a few ideas on the paper, you’ll have a financial script to proofread and amend.

Neither writing nor personal finance are linear journeys. There’s time travel involved in the process. There’s editing involved in the allocation of an investment account or discovering tax efficient strategies. You’ll no doubt go back and change what initially seemed a perfectly suitable lede paragraph. The hard part is getting started on the first draft. Being OK with something crappy and incomplete. After that, all you have to do is make your script a little less crappy than what you started with. Easy.

What can your crappy little elf do for you?

Do you have an activity that you’ve been putting off? Writing? Investing? Getting in shape? Building a relationship? Whatever it is, the best advice is to just start doing it. And start doing it very poorly.

There’s a great John Wooden quote that goes: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” Well, that quote doesn’t really apply here. In writing especially, doing it over is a huge part of doing it right. Initially, you should do a crappy job at saving and budgeting and investing. You don’t have to have a perfect financial plan, you just have to prove that you can put a plan together at all. As long as you acknowledge that it’s a work in progress, you’ll be off and running.

Turn a hard job, like saving and investing your money, into an easy one, like watching your money grow and making simple tweaks along the way. Or in my case, turn a hard job–like writing what will one day be a thought-provoking and intelligent blog post–into an easy one: writing and publishing the crappy version of this post you’re reading now.

Whatever it is, go try it. Get started. Give yourself something to fix, and you’ll be left with something a hell of a lot better than the nothing that you started with.