Writing starts with thinkingâŠand thinking starts with writing
I opened up Substack today ready to pen this emailâŠthen sensibly, I stopped.
Itâs a habit thatâs easy to get into but it kills your productivity and writing effectiveness: starting at your keyboard.
The best and fastest writing starts with thinking about what youâre going to write, not by jumping in and writing.
Scribble down the main message you want to get across and the key ideas that make up that message. Get down any specifics you want to include like the quote I opened with.
When I say âwriting starts with thinkingâ I mean that a few minutes organising your ideas first will save you 10x that time when it comes to writing the email, And it will be a better read.
And when I say âthinking starts with writingâ I mean that the best way to think about something is to scribble down notes. Our brains just arenât big enough to hold complex ideas in working memory so by jotting them down we get to see them properly and explore and improve them.
Once youâve scribbled down your message and main points you can âstoryboardâ your email by putting the individual ideas into the right sequence.
Thatâs when you move to the keyboard.
Now you can get writing with a solid structure and the main ideas in front of you.
Now itâs going to take you much less time and way fewer rewrites.
Next time youâre writing an email, hold back from jumping to your keyboard. Grab a pen and paper and just scribble down your main ideas.
Youâll be surprised at how much faster and better your writing becomes.
- Ian
PS that quote at the start is from me. It just jumped into my head as I started writing my ideas for this email down, but Iâm quite proud of it now I see it :)
I love this quote and really needed to know about the notes. I usually open a new google doc or something and write my notes ideas, and sources in a huge mess and then start writing parts of it somewhere on the paper. Very unorganized very messy. Need a better system . Thanks for the advice