I often apply it from the beginning for creative projects. For example if I am writing a story, I will need to consider "what makes a good story". If I were to develop the benchmark for this by consulting a list of "top 10 ways to make a good story," or did my research by looking at best-sellers, then I would only be capable of writing cliches. It would be very hard to get off of the blank page without just copying a complete work and then trying to modify parts.
But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction.
And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.
But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction.
And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.