“Every word written is a victory against death.” — Michel Butor

Writing things down is a key to effectiveness.   It helps you free up your mind, think on paper, and better organize your thoughts.   If you don’t write things down, your mind spends more time “paper shuffling” and creates its own anxiety.

Writing things down is a powerful habit.  Even if you throw it away, you still get the benefits.

What kinds of things can you write down?   Bright ideas that pop into your head.  Three wins that you want for today.  Three wins that you want for the week.  One-liner reminders.   Your To-Do list.    Your one-liner insights and “ah-has.”  All the things buzzing around in your brain.  Anything keeping you up at night.  Your hopes, your dreams, your goals, and aspirations.  Your fears, anxieties, and concerns.  You get the idea.

10 Reasons to Write Things Down

Why write things down?   Here are some key insights and reminders:

1. Your mind lies.   Your mind easily distorts things.   That’s a blessing and a curse.   If you write things down, you change perspective.  Now you are looking at it on paper.  Does it still make the same sense as it did in your head?
2. Think on paper.  When it’s on paper, you can look your challenges in the eyes, and slice them down to size.   Your mind is a powerful thing when it can more objectively look at things instead of swirling them around in your head.
3. Organize your thoughts.     To write things down, you have to think a little bit to find the words or to figure out what it means.  Right off the bat, the act of trying to write something down shapes your thoughts.   Once it’s down on paper, you can now list things in a way that helps you think.   Whether it’s because you cross things off, or prioritize them, or shuffle them to make you feel good, you are in control.
4. It sinks in better.  Writing it down creates a little more of an experience, and that helps it stick.
5. Free up your mind.   When you write something down, you free up the task of having to remember it.   That might not sound like a big deal when it’s just a few things, but you might spend your mind on better things.   And, just imagine when it’s more than a few things, and it’s lots of things on your mind.
6. Calm your mind.  The Zeigarnik Effect says we tend to hang on to things in our mind, if we don’t finish what we start.   If you write things down, you free up your mind from worrying about what you forgot or what you need to remember.
7. Let things go.     You can let things naturally slough off by squeezing them out with better things to focus on.    You can also more deliberately let things go, or simply cut them, because now you have a bird’s-eye view.  Decide what matters and what doesn’t.  Let things go that don’t.
8. Avoid task saturation.   Write things down to avoid task saturation.   Three signs of task saturation are shutting down, compartmentalizing, and channelizing. Shutting down is when you simply stop performing.  Compartmentalizing and channelizing is when you act busy, but all your doing is organizing and reorganizing lists and doing things sequentially, but not actually producing effective results.
9. Rehydrate ideas.   You can rehydrate your ideas later on as you need them.
10. Shelve things.  You can put things on the shelf to worry about at a later time.

3 Habits that Help

Here are three habits that can help you:

1. Bring a pen and paper on the go.      Bring a little pad of yellow stickies around with you.  You can easily write your three wins for the day on it.  You can also jot down your ideas or things that are top of mind.  You can also use it as a scratch pad for your thoughts.
2. Keep a journal of one-liner insights and reminders.   Write down the one-liner “ah-has” you have throughout your day.   These little ah-has add up quickly.   Stick them in a place that you can easily flip back through each week.   This will sharpen your brain and brighten your day.
3. Do periodic “Brain Dumps.” Periodically dump your brain.   You know when it’s full, or when it’s getting to the brim.   Dump it down on paper and simply write it down as fast as you can.  Get it off your mind.   Don’t correct yourself as you go, simply dump down all the stuff that’s floating around.  I do a brain dump at the end of my day, in a plain text file and simply name it today’s date, such as “2012-04-11.”   When I’m in a really fast mode, I just dump things on my whiteboard.

You can always choose not to write things down, but now you can make a more thoughtful choice.

My Related Posts

• Writing Things Down Frees You Up
• Dump Your Brain to Free Your Mind
• Tickler List of the Mind

The beauty of the Web is that we can share solutions on a page.

A friend of mine once challenged me with the question, “If you covered that topic, how many pages would it be? … 20 pages? … 30 pages?”

In one fell swoop,  he taught me to think of knowledge in terms of pages.

It was a swift, radical shift from collections of information to collections of pages.  A page really is a wonderful frame to hang a solution on.  If you’ve ever come across a well packaged, single solution on a single page, you know exactly what I mean.

When somebody tells me they want to blog, but don’t know what to write about, I suggest they solve a problem on a page.  If they do that multiple times, they can have a powerful blog.  Talk about divide and conquering a problem.

What problems can you solve on a page?

Photo by koalazymonkey.

I’ve long been a fan of writing things down to free myself up.  A while back, a friend of mine got me in the habit of carrying a little yellow sticky pad everywhere I go.  It lets me jot things down, wherever I go, so I never have to keep things buzzing around in my head.

I already knew that writing things down is a way to avoid task saturation.  I noticed the more I wrote down ideas, the more they flow.  I also noticed the more I write things down, the clearer my mind is.  I really am freed up.  I bet writing things down was a part of Edison and  da Vinci’s success.

While reading the book, Power Thinking: How the Way You Think Can Change the Way You Lead , I was happy to see John Mangerie and Cathy Block really spell it out so clearly:

Judicious analysts do two things when confronted with a difficult problem: they decide what strategy they will use to solve it and then write down ideas as they think of them.  By writing ideas down as they are generated, they free up their mind from the task of remembering them.  Thus, it is able to come up with additional possible solutions and to analytically assess the soundness of the ideas that have been developed during the problem-solving process.

I think this really helps clarify and support why writing things down is an important part of Getting Results.

Photo by Caitlinator.

Have you ever had to wait too long for somebody to make a point?   Their sentences run on but leave you hanging and you have to keep it all in your head to try and follow along.  They make you work too hard to follow the information.   Surprisingly, it’s not how long the sentences are that make them complex.  It’s how long it takes to complete the phrases.  We understand concepts phrase by phrase, not word by word.  As an author, when you know this, you can write simpler and more effectively to make your points.  As a reader, now you know why some writing is harder to follow than others.

In the book Mind Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain , Tom Stafford and Matt Webb write about how chunking up phrases can help simplify writing and make it easier to follow.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• We understand phrase by phrase.  We don’t parse text word by word.  Instead, we parse by phrases.  It’s the phrases we make sense of.
• It’s how long you have to wait.  It’s not how long a sentence is.  It’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to complete.  That’s what makes your working memory work too hard.
• Add details to phrases.  If you need to elaborate, you can add details to phrases.  Don’t weave in and out of details.  Effective sentences are built more like Legos than woven like scarves.
• Complete your phrases.  Complete your phrases quickly to simplify your writing.  People can only keep so much in their mind at a time.  Chunk your points up into phrases and complete your phrases quickly.
• You can chunk by noun phrases and verb phrases.  In noun phrases, the noun is the object of the sentence.  In verb phrases, the verb is the focus.  You can think in terms of boundaries around noun phrases and boundaries around verb phrases.
• Speeches need to be simpler than written text.  You can’t skip back and reread the speech.  If you want to deliver a speech that’s easy to follow, complete phrases as quickly as possible.
• Pay attention to buffers to simplify your writing.  If you want to simplify your writing, keep buffers and working memory in mind.  Don’t make people work too hard to follow your point.

We Understand Phrase by Phrase
You don’t comprehend word by word.  You make sense phrase by phrase.  Stafford and Webb write:

When you’re reading a sentence, you don’t understand it word by word, but rather phrase by phrase.  Phrases are groups of words that can be bundled together, and they’re related by the rules of grammar.  A noun phrase will include nouns and adjectives, and a verb phrase will include a verb and a noun, for example.  These phrases are the building blocks of language, and we naturally chunk sentences into phrase blocks just as we chunk visual images into objects.

It’s How Long We Wait for a Phrase to be Completed
It’s waiting to complete a phrase that makes sentences hard to understand.  Stafford and Webb write:

It’s now how long a sentence is that makes it hard to understand.  It’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed.   What this means is that we don’t treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts of phrases and have a buffer (a very short-term memory) that stores the words as they come in, until they can be allocated to a phrase.  Sentences become cumbersome not if they’re long, but if they overrun the buffer required to parse them, and that depends on how long the individual phrases are.

An Example of Increasing Complexity
Stafford and Webb share an example of increasing complexity: 

• The cat caught by the spider that caught the fly the old lady swallowed.
• The fly swallowed by the old lady was caught by the spider caught by the cat.
• The fly the spider the cat caught was swallowed by the old lady.

Sentences are More like Lego
You add details to phrases more like adding Lego blocks than weaving like scarves.  Add details Stafford and Webb write:

Human languages have the special property of being recombinant.  This means a sentence isn’t woven like a scarf, where if you want to add more detail you have to add it at the end.  Sentences are more like Lego.  The phrases can be broken up and combined with other sentences or popped open in the middle and more bricks added.

Examples of Noun and Verb Phrases
Stafford and Webb show an example of noun phrases:

• This sentence is an example.
• This boring sentence is a simple example.
• This long, boring sentence is a simple example of sentence structure.

Noun Phrases
In a noun phrase, the noun is the object of the sentence.  Stafford and Webb write:

The way sentences are understood is that they’re parsed into phrases.  One type of phrase is a noun phrase, the object of the sentence.  In “This sentence is a an example,” the noun phrase is “this sentence.”  For the second, it’s “this boring sentence.”

Verbal Working Memory
As you read, words sit in a buffer until you assemble the phrases.  Stafford and Webb write:

Once a noun phrase is fully assembled, it can be packaged up and properly understood by the rest of the brain.  During the time you’re reading the sentence, however, the words sit in your verbal working memory – a kind of short-term buffer – until the phrase is finished.

Verb Phrases
In verb phrases, the verb is the focus.  Phrase boundaries around verb phrases and noun phrases make sentences easier to understand.  Stafford and Webb write:

Verb phrases work the same way.  When your brain sees “is,” it knows there’s a verb phrase starting and holds the subsequent words in memory until the phrase has been closed off (with the word “example,” in the first sentence in the previous list).  Similarly, the last part of the final sentence, “of sentence structure,” is a prepositional phrase, so it’s also self-contained.  Phrase boundaries make sentences much easier to understand.  Rather than the object of the third example sentence being three times more complex than the first (it’s three words: “long, boring sentence” versus one, “sentence”), it can be understood as the same object, but with modifies.

Very Small Trees that are Completed Quickly
Phrases are like trees within trees.  Stafford and Webb write:

A sentence takes on a treelike structure, for these simple examples, in which phrases are smaller trees within that.  To understand a whole phrase, its individual tree has to join up.  These sentences are all easy to understand because they’re composed of very small trees that are completed quickly.

Finding Phrase Boundaries
Word order plays a key role in finding phrase boundaries.  Stafford and Webb write: 

To find phrase boundaries, we check individual word meaning and likelihood of word order, continually revise the meaning of the sentence, and so on, all the while the buffer is growing.

Good Speeches Minimize the Amount of Working Memory
Speeches need to be simpler than written text because you can’t skip back and reread them.  Stafford and Webb write:

A characteristic of good speeches (or anything passed down in an oral tradition) is that they minimize the amount of working memory, or buffer, required to understand them.  This doesn’t matter so much for written text, in which you can skip back and read the sentence again to figure it out; you have only one chance to hear and comprehend the spoken word, so you’d  better get it right the first time around.  That’s why speeches written down always look so simple.

You Can’t Ignore the Buffer size for Written Language
If you want to increase simplicity, then pay attention to buffers even in written language.  Stafford and Webb write:

That doesn’t mean you can ignore the buffer size for written language.  If you want to make what you say, and what you write, easier to understand, consider the order in which you are giving information in a sentence.  See if you can group together the elements that go together so as to reduce demand on the reader’s concentration.  More people will get to the end of your prose with the energy to think about what’ve said or do what you ask.

My Related Posts

• Five Principles to Improve Your Conversational Writing
• Why You Should Write in Books

Photo by jefield.

Five Principles for Improving Conversational Communication
Based on results and experience, I agree with Perlman’s principles for more effective writing and speech.  His five principles for improving conversational communication are:

• Principle 1 – Replace abstraction with action.
• Principle 2 – Replace passive with active expressions.
• Principle 3 – Break up long compound structures.
• Principle 4 – Expand nominalized sentences into full sentences.
• Principle 5 – Use contractions.

Principle 1 -  Replace Abstraction with Action
You should mention people over using abstractions.  Perlman provides examples:

Don’t

• The modernization of our facilities is proceeding on schedule.
• Current projects show a very constrained outlook.
• Management recommended radical cost reductions.
• Any increase in the gasoline tax of sufficient size to significantly impact the budget deficit.

Do

• We’re modernizing our facilities and proceeding on schedule.
• We are/Our staff is currently projecting a very constrained outlook.
• Management recommended that we cut our costs radically.
• If we/the government increase(s) the gasoline tax enough to significantly impact the budget deficit …

Principle 2 – Replace Passive with Active Expressions
Say who’s performing the action so it sounds more personal.  Don’t avoid the passive completely but emphasize who or what is performing the action where you can.  Perlman provides examples:

Don’t

• Three thousand additional employees were hired.
• Our cost-reduction efforts were intensified.
• These conclusions which were drawn from the study, …
• When combined with renewed emphasis on product quality, these efforts can …
• It is assumed that new products will claim a significant market share.

Do

• We/The firm hired three thousand additional employees.
• We intensified our cost-reduction efforts.
• These conclusions, which I/we/our consultants drew from the study …
• When we combine them with renewed emphasis on product quality, these efforts can …
• We/I assume that the new products will claim a significant market share.

Principle 3 – Break Up Long Compound Structures
Spell out what you mean.  Don’t use clever and concise compound phrases that only specialists understand.  Write out the phrases using simple words.  Perlman provides examples:

Don’t

• sales tax
• user call placement procedure
• committee meeting agenda

Do

• increase in the tax on sales
• procedure that people use to place calls
• agenda for the meeting of the committee

According to Perlman, for specialists communicating to each other, these long compounds become a kind of in-group shorthand.  You don’t have to spell out the relationships between the elements, like in the examples above, because the audience already knows what they mean.  When you cultivate a personal style, on the other hand, you’re replicating spontaneous speech.  Use only the compounds that are clearly understandable.

Principle 4 – Expand Nominalized Sentences into Full Sentences
When we use nouns instead of verbs or adjectives — a process called nominalization — to compress part of a statement, we make communication more complex.  Perlman provides an example:

Don’t

• The expectation of management is that the economy is at the beginning of recovery

Do

• Management expects  the economy to begin to recover.

Perlman writes:

“The problem with nominalization is that it requires the listener to reconstruct the sentence that’s been compressed.  There’s also a cultural problem with nominalization.  Frequent nominalization is well established in the language of bureaucracies, scientists, and others whose professions require an impersonal style of communication.  Since actions expressed as nouns rather than verbs allow the agent (the doer) to be omitted, nominalization may leave doubts as to who’s doing what.  (In fact, bureaucrats may love nominalization just because it avoids mentioning who did what.)

To make your communication more conversational and more intelligible to non-native speakers, convert each nominalization to a full sentence.”

Principle 5 – Use Contractions
Contractions are a very strong signal of a personal conversational style.  Perlman provides a set of common acceptable contractions for everyday speeches:

Acceptable for all but the most formal of speeches …

• Contractions with not: won’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t, can’t, couldn’t.
• Contractions with pronoun or that with am/are/is: I’m, you’re, he’s, she’s, it’s, we’re, they’re, that’s
• Contractions with will: I’ll, you’ll, he’ll, she’ll, we’ll, they’ll
• Contractions with have/has: I’ve, you’ve, he’s, she’s, it’s, they’ve
• Contractions of I would: I’d

Acceptable only in spoken language or very informal written communications

• Contraction with is (e.g. executive’s — as in executive’s leaving)
• Contraction of it will: it’ll
• Contraction of pronoun and would: you’d, he’d, she’d, we’d, they’d
• Contractions of pronoun and had: I’d, you’d, he’d, she’d, they’d.

How To Choose Between a Personal or Impersonal Style
Perlman writes:
While most of your speeches will be in a personal style, you’ll want to be sensitive to those situations in which a little more formality is required — for example, a eulogy or a serious business or scientific/technical presentation.  Ask yourself how your subject is typically discussed and what your audience expects.  Then adjust your language accordingly.

The Quality of Your Life and Communication
Writing and speaking are powerful tools if you use them effectively.  In fact, I think you can argue that the quality of your life is the quality of your communication to yourself and others.

Conversational Over Formal
While some audiences and communities require impersonal speeches and writing, a lot of the most impactful communication is conversational and personal. 

In school, I learned to write formally and put the focus on the topic.  On the job, I’ve learned to be more adaptable and put the focus where it makes sense, whether it’s the topic or the reader. 

I’ve also learned to use a more conversational style and to choose simpler words and phrases.  This helps me reach a wider audience and makes the information easier to follow.  After all, what good is the information, if I can’t help you understand it or use it?

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Where appropriate, choose conversational over formal.  Kathy Sierra says it best in her post, Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass.
• Don’t make the reader work too hard.  Don’t write to impress, write  to be understood.  If your audience has to reparse every sentence in their head just to follow along, then you’re making them work too hard.  You can use the approaches above to help fix this issue.
• Speak the same language as your audience.  Not literally, but figuratively.  If you want to reach a wider audience, then avoid jargon where you can and say things as simple as possible, but no simpler.  When you’re among specialists in your field, then feel free to use your special words and phrases.  For example, among a bunch of pattern authors, we can speak using patterns and condense our conversations.  Outside that audience, it doesn’t help to use terms that have to constantly be explained.
• Keep your audience front and center.  Picture your audience immediately across the table from you.  This helps you make the right trade-offs for words you use and the style you choose.  It’s hard to go wrong, when it’s right for your audience.
• Don’t try to please everybody.  You can’t.   There isn’t a universal style that makes everybody happy.  However, you can eliminate some problem patterns in your writing or speaking that turn your audience off.
• Eliminate worst things first.  If you want to make big improvements, pull your big levers first.  Get some feedback from folks you trust to identify the top three things they’d like you to improve.
• Know the secret of great writing.  Luckily, the secret to great writing isn’t about your writing at all.  It’s the feelings, insights and actions you inspire in your readers. 
• Know what you want to accomplish.  Knowing is half the battle.  Do you want to inspire, educate, improve … etc.?    Knowing that helps you figure out what to tune in your writing and speaking.
• Measure by effectiveness.    If you know what you want to accomplish, know you can gauge your effectiveness.