Write it up
“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” — Joan Didion
There are a few particularly humbling features of being a strategist.
One is when you design a deck, then the account or project management team passes it to the design team to clean it up before a client presentation, and you clearly see how it could have looked if you were a great designer, a different person entirely. This one is a great metaphor for life itself.
Another is when you’re totally stuck on, say, a breakfast food brief, so you’re googling stuff and search for something like “what is breakfast?” to try to get inspiration. This makes you wonder if you’ll ever have a worthwhile thought again.
Yet another is the rollercoaster of: thought in your head to idea you write down, then from thing you write down then say aloud to yourself, and then from practicing aloud to presenting it to someone else. This spooling arc is pure pain, but totally necessary.
I had this coworker for some time who was very smart and had great strategic instincts. They’d spitball nice sounding ideas and suggest that they were the solution. Now, those things could have been the solution. But my rollercoaster scars told me that there might be some refinement necessary before it could be a viable strategic plan.
So my response to their suggestions, being an absolute prick? “Write it up.”
Among a dense thicket of meetings, chats, and emails, we’re used to consuming, and sometimes creating, compelling notions. We hear smart-sounding stuff all the time. Those are different than coherent plans. Plans aren’t perfect, but good ones are the result of interrogation of objectives, deep research around an array of potentially irrelevant topics, consideration of viable options, and then that pure pain of exposure to rigorous questioning.
These posts I do every other Monday start out as scraps of notions. I write those down in Evernote then let them just sit there until I have a cousin notion. Then on the next Monday morning, I’ll start writing them up. Here’s the note I wrote for this post:
(“AJ quote” refers to the Joan Didion quote above, which my friend and USC business communication professor Andrew Ogilvie mentioned in a chat last year.)
I don’t read these aloud or share them with anyone before I post them, but I try to at least find the typos and gaps in logic. Transferring from Evernote, where I write, to Medium, where I edit and publish, helps me find all but the 1–2 typos that always manage to sneak through.
They probably take 45 minutes, all-in, most of that dedicated to turning notes like the one above into something that resembles a takeaway. A recent brief I wrote took 20 times that to get to a presentable state.
We hear all the time about how our attention spans are waning. I thought this tweet from Amanda Goetz was an interesting provocation around that:
Netflix lost nearly 1 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2022.
In Q1 of 2022, TikTok had over 1 billion monthly active users (up 40%), with 1.8 billion predicted by the end of 2022.
I truly wonder what attention spans and brains will look like in 2042.
One way to combat it, at least professionally, is to write notes, emails, and decks that are usable as opposed to workplace entertainment. Buzzwordy half-thoughts are tempting to write and read, but they’re the travel meal Instagram story, #takemeback post, or LinkedIn sob story of the corporate world: useless distraction disguised as dopamine kicks.
If finding focus is hard, offering it is way harder. Happy humble honing.
