Improving my Design and Strategy Docs Output at Work - Part Two

My document output has increased in quality and quantity since I published the first part of this series a year and a half ago. How I achieved that has nothing to do with the majority of frameworks and inspiration sources I outlined in that post.

During these 18 months, I explored multiple recommendations and systems from experts on personal knowledge management believing in the promise of an increased output through small but constant efforts to distilling insights and connections.

There were a few problems with that approach that ranged from the lifecycle of documents in my job to fundamental gaps in my writing routine.

Rapid Drafts and Company Cadence

My strategy and vision documents benefit from connecting disparate areas for my audience and having proper references. This strengthens my talking points and clarifies the problem scope to team members and decision makers.

These considerations for crafting documents are a common starting point for PKM and productivity experts explaining their frameworks. Unfortunately, I found that the cycle between investigation, drafts, output and feedback is too short and dynamic in my organisation to leverage those ideas.

I can publish unrefined documents to start a discussion and polish the ideas together with the audience while influencing their views. This works because my organisation embraces docs-driven collaboration and rapid drafts.

Note that unrefined doesn’t mean sloppy. Good rules on written communication are paramount to influence others and the ideas must have enough merit to be discussed.

The other driver shortening the drafting cycle is the big company business cadence.

In a business year, i.e. fiscal or OKR based, you have to draft more documents focused on medium term strategies, program descriptions and designs rather than vision documents. That means spending time curating insights in a knowledge base doesn’t help in the most common scenarios.

After understanding these two drivers -rapid drafts and company cadence- I realised it was more effective to work on my perfectionism. It was better to share a quick bullet point draft than a thorough document to disseminate ideas since the earlier you do the more powerful they become in a business context.

Internal vs. External Sources and Tooling

Certain practices to distill insights from multiple sources, e.g. Andy Matuschak's note about using complete phrases to sharpen claims, helped me draft documents much faster but I couldn’t overcome the friction caused by the format of my sources when trying to apply the majority of note-taking techniques.

There is a lot of information I need to use found in slide decks (without speaker notes!) and other formats that are difficult to summarise.

There aren’t many recommendations on how to deal with this issue and without the possibility of automation plus the fast cycles discussed before it became easier to summarise the idea behind a slide or reuse certain visual elements directly in the document draft.

I’m aware of how multimodal large models can accelerate the idea distillation even in unstructured sources although using them, with all their caveats, pushes me more to work on the drafts directly rather than another staging area for insights.

The Writing Craft

It should have been obvious from the beginning but following recommendations to help non-fiction writers was one of the most fruitful actions I took to refine and scale my output.

There is a lot of material for authors and journalists explaining how to parse data, create narratives and summarise information that can be applied in the business and tech context.

In particular, recommendations for data journalists on templates, tooling and the craft of writing were outstanding. These ranged from books like On Writing Well to discussing how to make writing more pleasant in general (iA Writer + the most recent Markdown functionality in Google Docs!)

What’s next?

I mentioned LLMs briefly but tools like NotebookLM have allowed me to distill ideas and switch context much faster than before. It’s dangerous to use AI to write your thoughts but using it to summarise and explore connections has saved me a lot of time and I will continue learning how to leverage it more to increase my output.

I also intend to keep exploring the solutions in the PKM and productivity pr0n space since I recognise that I might not have applied the techniques in the best way possible or there might be a new development that will make it click for me.

Let’s hope that I can use the ideas discussed here to increase the output on this blog and document any new developments in quicker instalments!