During the pandemic, I didn’t do a ton of actual writing. I barely blogged. I don’t think I did more than 1 or 2 publication, popular or academic. Even worse, I didn’t do a ton of actual reading. At first, I thought it was the pandemic itself. This is stressful stuff, my work life had been through into complete chaos, and my daily living routine was in tatters.

Over the past year or so, however, I slowly realized it was something bigger: I was having trouble concentrating, especially for the 3 or 4 hour blocks of time it took to write well. Or to blow through a book. Or to really study bridge defense. At first I thought I was just getting old. Doesn’t this happen to everyone when they hit their mid-40s? But the more I examined it, the more I started to believe it was a function of how I was consuming information. I was massively multi-tasking, almost full-time. And the two biggest culprits were my email inbox and my twitter feed.

Workers now inherently multitask, because they build their work world around their inbox, which is constantly delivering them different streams of work.

In part II on your engineering superpower (technical writing), Sophie DeBenedetto talks about how to write well.

Blogging

Try these strategies to help you get started:

• Write an outline first.
• Start with a detailed introduction.
• Write the conclusion first.

If you use the conclusion first approach, focus on what the reader should walk away from your post having learned.

Pull Requests

A good PR description has a few elements:

• A descriptive title.
• An explanation of the what, why, and how.
  • ____ What problem does the code solve?
  • ____ Why is this solution needed?
  • ____ How does the code solve the problem?
• Extras: Anything from usage instructions to info on testing/QA.

How to Write a Ticket

• What problem needs to be solved and why?
• What value does the project gain by delivering this work?

How To Ask For Help

• What is the current behavior? Describe the bug that is occurring.
• Under what circumstances does the behavior occur?
• How does the behavior differ from the expected behavior?

If you’re a product designer, researcher, or marketer, UX writing is a tool in your content design arsenal to sharpen.
So what makes good UX writing? Copy that is clear, concise, useful, and consistent. Here are 10 tips to help you get there.

Sílvia Bastos

What could I write about today that my future self would benefit from reading?”

Second: 5 (or so) bullets

The truth is, it doesn’t have to be five — it could work as well with a bit less or a few more. Personally, I find seven to be the number that works best for me, but I recommend starting with five to make it easier—then adapt it to your own preferences.

• An inverted solid triangle for creative ideas
• An upright triangle for big wins
• An eye for cues and signs
• A spiral for big lessons and questions to ponder
• A square (that I can use as a checkbox later) for actions and experiments I want to do

Back in 2016, Adam J. Calhoun wrote a fascinating Medium post in which he showed off something quite cool: What novels look like if you strip away the words, and show just the punctuation.

Last night I quickly cobbled together this simple web tool — “just the punctuation”.
https://just-the-punctuation.glitch.me/

Do yourself a favor. Write down the story of your project.

By writing, you’re making sense of things.

You will untangle what is on your head and make it explicit.

I really enjoyed this feature in the Sunday NYTimes, so I used the questions as writing prompts in my diary this morning.

1.What’s one thing you made this year?

2. What art have you turned to in this time?
3. Did you have any particularly bad ideas?
4. What’s a moment from this year you’ll always remember?
5. Did you find a friendship that sustained you artistically?
6. If you’d known that you’d be so isolated for so long, what would you have done differently?
7. What do you want to achieve before things return to normal?

Readable & Writable
Typora gives you a seamless experience as both a reader and a writer. It removes the preview window, mode switcher, syntax symbols of markdown source code, and all other unnecessary distractions. Instead, it provides a real live preview feature to help you concentrate on the content itself.

I picked up How To Take Smart Notes (affiliate link) by Sönke Ahrens. Ahrens is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen and also coaches students, academics, and professionals with a focus on time management, decision-making, and personal growth.

It is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject. I was astounded to encounter in its pages (with uncanny similarity) many of the same principles I had discovered over 10 years of personal experience.

1. Use personal pronouns
2. Start with a verb
3. Prevent concerns
4. Use natural language
5. Default to active voice
6. Show useful error messages
7. Write iteratively

In much the same way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done method of productivity can be boiled down to five simple actions — Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect and Engage- the zettelkasten method can be summed up in a handful of activities. I’d call these Collect, Process, Cross-Reference and Use.

Why Journaling is So Effective

They say if you want to reach your goals, write them down.

If you want to remember something, write it down.

If you want to discover what’s really going on in your mind, write it down.

I use journaling to serve all three of those purposes.

Here’s how it works. You write down 10 ideas per day. These ideas can be about anything you want. You can create ideas to improve your own life. You can also create ideas for other peoples lives and businesses. James says he often uses his ideas as a networking technique. He’ll create ideas for others and send them (tactfully) as suggestions.

Writing helped me to become a better designer, leader, and thinker. As a designer, my job is to take a mess of ideas and issues and transform them into a product or solution. Writing helped me learn how to clean the clutter and make products that delight people.

You may not consider yourself a “writer,” but to strengthen your writing, you don’t have to be. Good writing shouldn’t be reserved for English majors or professional authors.

My writing is still nowhere near perfect, but over the years, I’ve been bookmarking a collection of practical tricks to sharpen it — hopefully, they will help you as much as they have helped me.

Tips for publishing something new every day, and approaching your progression as a writer with kindness rather than judgement.

You can be authentic, unique, and sincere, but your writing has to do one of these three things to succeed.

Entertain
Educate
Inspire

Great writing is alchemy — you take bits of entertainment, mix in some education, and add a dash of inspiration, in order to create remarkable work.

The 10:1 rule of writing and programming

Good software and good writing requires that every line has been rewritten, on average, at least 10 times.

First, it looks like similar 10:1 rules show up in film, journalism, music, and photography! How cool is that?

You’re asking the wrong question.

“What process can we come up with so that we are creating something new, every single day?”

Content creation is about Volume. Plain and simple.

• Write three opening lines to three separate stories.
• Pick one event that occurred during the day and describe it in any style you like within ten minutes.
• What is your favorite TV or film character doing today?
• Describe or imagine the history of an object around your house.
• Write the events of your day as newspaper headlines

It’s Your Obligation To Create Amazing Things
By missing out on many of the ‘one days’ in which you could’ve created something valuable and worthwhile, you do a disservice to yourself, your audience and your craft. Something awesome could have been there for the world to see — but it isn’t.

So, stop getting distracted by meaningless things. Stop letting your excuses get the better of you. And stop letting your fears dictate your work.

In that one day, you could create that blogpost or video that goes viral. You could create something that makes an impact on the lives of others. Something that grows your business. Something that changes your own life. Stop letting BS excuses get in your way and stop being your own worst enemy. You owe it to yourself, your audience and your mission to create amazing things as often as you can.