Writing my thoughts and feelings has always been an important part of my life. Yet this has been private journaling with very little published - a few articles on Medium, a few tweets here and there, but not much else. I’m a bit of a late bloomer in this regard and hope to fill out this blog over the coming months by publishing my content.
I have a few ways to mentally frame writing. Write because you want to, not because others write whom you aspire to. Find what you care about and write about that. Write first and foremost for your benefit - with benefit to others being a consequence, not the goal.
Knowing what you care about helps you be intentional with work. When you care for a thing, lots of mental energy is expended towards it. Writing things down helps unload the mind, and acts as a form of therapy. It’s a way to make thoughts and feelings come alive - a creative and clear expression of that which you care about.
A brain dump into words is not enough - thoughts expressed through words have to be shaped (articulated and organised). Distil them. Clarify them. Arrange them. Making thoughts clear on paper also helps organise them in mind. As a bonus, memory is improved via this process - it helps you recall important things years later.
Why share writings? Well by this point, you may as well share them! Your content may not be useful or agreeable to everyone, but it could be a gem to just a few. Imagine if just one person comes across your content and it helps them in some small way. If that one person could then do something useful in the world, how awesome would it be if such a chain of effects were to occur?
How to find the time? Honestly, if you are working intentionally in your day job on things you care about, there should be plenty of content. I have an endless list of things to write about and will probably never get enough time for it all. Most thoughts and learnings naturally come out of things people spend most of their time on. It is considerably easier to write about the thing you have spent the last seven hours working on.
How to do it well? First off - use Grammarly, it’s a no-brainer. Read a lot (really, a lot) and notice how the content is structured and expressed. Well-written content is conversational (natural) in style, and kept simple and well-structured (headings, paragraphs, bullet points, short sentences). Write often and practise making things clear. Review your content - come back to it fresh and you’ll spot lots of optimisations. Do all these things, but don’t aim for perfection. Once it is good enough, publish it (you can always optimise again later).
Do I have to write? As an introvert, writing and publishing blogs is a natural match for me. For others, there are alternative communication types (visual, verbal) and mediums (e.g. podcasting and conference presentations). As your desire grows to share content more widely, and you move towards selling your ideas, you may need to open up new communication types and mediums. Nevertheless, start with what is comfortable for you before expanding out.
Writing at work is a large part of my life these days - drafting team vision statements, reasoning out strategy, creating team operating manuals, articulating team agreements, and communicating outcomes. This documentation is not heavy in any way (Agile principles that lean towards working software still apply). However, core to the success of a distributed working environment is the asynchronous consumption of content. Written content is often the default type, quite rightly given it is easily discoverable and searchable. It is usually then supplemented with other types of communication e.g. visual content like diagrams or videos. Often I find that if content can be communicated in written form, translating to verbal and visual styles becomes a lot easier.
How do you know you have written enough? This one is hard; however, for me, it is a feeling that what I wanted to say about a topic is covered, at least for now :)