Writing is thinking, and thinking is critical to great, intentional work.
How often are you writing about your work? Based on my first-hand work experiences, I’m confident many people never take time to organize their thoughts around the work they’re doing through writing. But why?
My colleagues have provided many excuses over the years:
- “I don’t have the time”
- “I’m a terrible writer”
- “I don’t see the value”
- “I don’t have anything to write about”
…but as you’ll soon find out, all of these are easily rebuttable.
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
-Louis L’Amour
Whether you’re a CEO, team lead, or the newest person in the office, if you want to improve preparedness and productivity, better monitor and assess your performance, or receive guidance and coaching…just start writing! It doesn’t take much time or effort to start and the benefits are immediate.
Daily & Weekly Writings
Set the Table for a Focused Day
We recommend starting your day by writing down what you’ll be working on. Be specific and realistic with what you plan to accomplish. Your day is likely chopped up with meetings, so no need to oversell it; that’s not the point. Aim to outline your day in 2-4 bullet points.
Once you know exactly what you need to get done, you can block off your schedule. It’s critical you make time for uninterrupted deep work rather than jump back and forth between tools at every alert. Focus and productivity will flourish. And since shallow work will always part of the job, you can assign work blocks for all those noisier reactive tasks, too.
Quick Daily Reflections
Daily reflections give you an opportunity to admit when you’re challenged while acknowledging and appreciating what goes right throughout your day.
This shouldn’t be a linear summary of the work you did. It can and should be a varied look-back at hyper-specifics from the workday. Take time to assess not only the outputs but the process of work itself.
A few prompts you can use to guide your daily reflections:
- What is one specific thing that challenged you and how did you seek out help to overcome it?
- What is something from your work day you feel proud of accomplishing
- What is one thing that happened today that I am appreciative of?
Over time, this short daily exercise will cause a massive shift in how you perceive your work. Your focus will move away from what you can’t change, the past, towards all that you’ve learned and now can build-upon. This is visible growth!
Jodi Picoult drives this point home better than I ever could, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page”.
Writing Performance Recaps
Days and weeks have a tendency to bleed together and fly by. Especially lately. Take a step-back to assess your work in small segments for a trending view at how you’re performing. Broader themes will emerge when you assess your completed work and the lessons learned along the way.
John Dewey, educator and philosopher, contends “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience”. If you fail to reflect you risk undervaluing your progress. It’s super important to acknowledge your growth and self-identify areas for improvement. Weekly write-ups will allow you to determine where you need some guidance.
Rest assured, Your writing is truly for you! However, we strongly suggest sharing these check ins with your manager, and if you’re up for it, the rest of your team. Having readers will keep you focused. This isn’t about showing your manager the work you’re doing, it’s about you, your growth as a professional, and how they can help guide your improvement.
At Strety, we love writing about our work in our Messages tool. We use Messages in spaces to have deeper, asynchronous conversations about what’s going on. For example, our marketing person just noticed an uptick in trials from Ireland. Why Ireland? She wrote about what she found, which not only helped us all understand, but helped her think through our Irish influx, and what it meant for our marketing strategy.
Top of Mind Writing
Fill in the Gaps
Daily write-ups, even as simple bulleted lists, hedge against issues or questions falling through the cracks. Questions pop-up throughout your workday that may not be important enough to bring up in a team meeting or 1:1 but still need clarification. You can then throw these bullet points into the best place to communicate in Strety — the associate To Do, Rock, or Issue if there is one.
This allows managers an opportunity to guide and offer corrections in a very lightweight, reactive, yet timely way that doesn’t disrupt their workflow.
A Record of Your Work
A historical, segmented record of your work is a useful resource for your future self. Preparing for quarterly meetings, annual performance reviews, or even updating your resume are all much easier when you have multiple datapoints to refer to. We all suffer from recency bias. Trying to remember one’s entire body of work – all the challenges and accomplishments – at a single point in the future almost guarantees you’ll leave something important out.
An Idea Vault
Ideas and thoughts can be incredibly fleeting. Imagine that your short-term focus is on customer acquisition but you’ve just read something appealing on upselling. What do you do with the information? You may think you’ll remember that great idea next quarter when your focus is on upselling, but, we all know that’s unlikely. Just because there isn’t a place for it now doesn’t mean there won’t be later. Write down ideas as they come to you and be able to recall them when timing is right.
Thought Organization
The occasional braindump – just writing on a topic without any thought to form or structure – can help you make sense of your thoughts or half-formulated ideas. By getting everything out and on paper you can begin to organize and structure your thoughts before pitching or presenting.
We’re Here to Help
At Strety we definitely practice what we preach. We use Strety as our EOS software and we also use tools in Strety to write every day. Whether it’s a response to a comment on a To Do, or a long Message exploring a recent trend in that will impact our business, we’re writing thoughtfully all the time. We also reflect on the work we accomplish, and wins we should be celebrating. The honest, authentic, and transparent nature of our work-related writing is an indispensable part of our culture.
If you want to see what it’s like to have a free-flowing communication culture (that doesn’t rely on endless meetings) give Strety a try for free, or book time with one of our experts to walk through our favorite communication tools.