“💡… I’m going to write a document” - Me, all the time at work.
”This could have been a document meeting”
The topic of document writing and sharing came up at work not long ago. The engineering organisation was looking at improving collaboration and being more efficient in driving for alignment when plans involve multiple product teams. One action we took was to be more deliberate in our writing vs. what we discuss in person and in meetings; the theory being that over-indexing on documents was causing lengthy review cycles and ultimately slowed us down.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this initially, because writing comes with a ton of benefits:
- a document can act as a record of decisions and reasoning,
- a document is easy to share asynchronously, particularly helpful if working across timezones,
- it can evolve naturally - either in-line, or versioned to preserve the evolution process,
- it challenges you to explain concepts clearly to an audience who may not be familiar in that domain,
While I have become more deliberate in what I use documents for vs. a syncronous meeting, I still strongly believe I get a heap of value lot out of writing.
Not for busy-work or for alignment purposes, but to help me think. That might be putting it a bit mildly. It doesn’t help me think, it is me thinking.
Writing is thinking
Don’t wait until you feel you really deeply know something, or need to work it out, before writing. Write it to deeply understand it.
Journaling to express my thoughts and feelings, writing to explore strategic opportunities, examining problems and possible solutions regarding how the team is operating; I write it down, I read it back, I write a plan of action and compare it to the problem statement to ensure it tackles the root problem. If no-one ever reads it, it’s not a waste of time as it has helped me refine my thinking.
This isn’t a new concept or even a new phrase. But it’s one I’m exploring further, both at work and in my free time (like this blog 👋).
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