Every Project Has a Scope
With creating something like software, it’s easy to see it as having a scope of what it can and cannot do. You can recognize that the software having more features means increasing scope.
I realized that pretty much every idea and project has a scope. It’s just more difficult to think of the scope of a project for something like a piece of art.
I guess you could try to look at a piece’s scope by measuring how detailed a piece needs to be or how many “things” there are, but art is more about figuring out what details you want to include while you’re doing it. As you work, you may find you want to take the piece in a different direction than what you originally thought. How does that factor into the scope?
Even for something like writing this very blog post, how would I define the scope? Is it based on the things I want to say or how in depth my explanations are? What about things like word count, measuring how much time I spend coming up with what to write, or measuring how much I revise and edit?
Knowing when you’re done polishing and should stop is a very classic issue in art. The end result is much more difficult to conceptualize and quantify, so it’s hard to separate “what it is” from “what it isn’t” until you’ve already done it and are satisfied. It's all about vibes, you know?
Meta blog note - As it turns out, this post is longer than I originally thought because I found that there was more I wanted to say. I think this helps illustrate my point.
Despite the difficulties, I think it's a good exercise for me to understand the scope of the things I want to work on.