I heard once that a quota is a great tool for removing the most undeserving of a disproportionately represented group. This idea makes sense to me. If I go from eating a different takeout pizza every night to eating just one per month, the pizzas I stop eating will be the worst pies of the bunch.
I wonder if a beginning writer needs form in the same way a lazy decision maker needs quotas. If you are new to the craft, an essay like "Ten Ways Coronavirus Changed My Life" means the eleventh idea gets scrapped - the structure forces a choice. But if you have no idea what you are doing and fail to work within some kind of structure, you might just end up listing all the ways life changed, and forget to consider whether there is a threshold that no longer interests the reader.
