How Writing Can Help You Succeed in the Shift to Remote Work

Writing becomes a foundational skill for remote. Learn how do it well

Oct 25, 2020

In today’s edition of The Discourse, I want to cover a topic that is really close to my heart — writing. While there's enough being written about the shift to remote work, writing will play a critical role in people’s success. I believe writing is a key skill that you can leverage to really stand out in an organization. I have been appreciated for the way I write emails, for my crisp communication in Slack, and for the comprehensiveness of my spec docs. I take you through why it’s important, what are good examples, and how to get better. Enjoy this one!

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Why is writing important?

Shift to remote

While earlier you would communicate with your colleagues by just walking to their desk and talking, now you have to communicate mostly in writing.

Writing can be internal like in Slack and email, specs documents, plans, release notes, roadmaps, comments, etc.

Or external writing like communicating to customers or partners through tweets, blogs, website copy, email, customer support, and many other ways.

I've worked at a company where my boss would just explain something by talking about it for a few minutes. But due to brevity, it lacked clarity. And there would be an eventual disconnect.

This is also especially true if you work at a company that is geographically spread where you only have a few hours overlap every day. The remaining time has to be connected through writing.

Writing scales, talking doesn’t

Let me explain what that means. Let’s say you're explaining something over a call to one team member - then, you will have to repeat the same information to the other team members.

Whereas, if you write things down, you just need to do it once.

Count the number of times you have to repeat the same instructions and you’ll realize that you’re better served by writing things down.

Don’t waste your productive time in meetings

It astonishes me that some people I know spend more than half their time in meetings. That's half their time being unproductive.

Reflect on your own organization. How many meetings do you have in a day? How much time is spent in these meetings? And how many of those meetings could’ve been avoided with better documentation or an email?

You can do the math. Multiply the number of participants by the total time of the meeting. This will give you everyone's per hour cost and you'll see how expensive meetings really are!

Meetings also have a limit to how many people can contribute at the same time, i.e., usually 2 or max 3. Now if there's a meeting with 10 people, the other 7 are passive participants.

I know that in some situations, it's just simpler to have everyone on one call and discuss something. But that should be the exception, not the norm.

The only exceptions to this rule, according to me, are standup meetings and all-hands meetings.

What do top startup people say about writing?

Sahil Lavingia

Sahil @shl

Miscommunication is expensive. The best ways to minimize it are to stay as small as you can, hire generalists (compress the talent stack), teach people to manage up, move slower, and instill writing as a core component of your culture.

David Perell

David Perell @david_perell

In a remote work world, writing well is an essential skill. Three ideas from @jasonfried: 1) Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone. 2) Poor communication creates more work. 3) Internal communication should be based on long-form writing.

Julian

Julian Shapiro @Julian

Writing is thinking on paper. Becoming a better writer makes you a better all-around thinker. You learn to communicate more clearly and persuasively. The world's top minds became brilliant *through* the habit of writing. Writing is how you too can realize your potential.

Shaun at Stripe

Shaun Young @shaunyou

I'm only a month into my time @stripe, but I've never encountered a tech company of this size where writing is such a center of gravity.

So what constitutes good writing?

First, writing has to serve a few purposes:

Writing has to be clear

The key issue faced with bad writing is that it isn't clear, which ends up taking more time to explain, and usually used as evidence that writing isn't effective. Talking can clear things out easily.

For that purpose, writing should bring clarity. It should be unambiguous. It should address or mention all likely scenarios and questions beforehand.

Writing has to be concise

People don’t have time. You have to convey your points in the least number of words. Good writing doesn’t mean it has to be flowery language.

Pyramid writing, a long favorite of management consultants, is a good way to communicate information to busy people:

Start with the conclusion at top
Explain how you reached the conclusion
Add a table of contents so that people can skim to the section they're interested in reading

Writing has to be purposeful

What do I mean by purposeful? It needs to have a purpose to exist. It needs to be persuasive to drive consensus on a topic. For that, it needs to be engaging enough – what isn't actually read is useless.

You can include a narrative to make it engaging, but not at the cost of the other two aspects.

Examples of great business writing

How to make your writing better?

Observe the themes used in the links above and include them in your writing
Notice times when your writing created questions or didn’t resonate
Make it a habit — write daily or at least weekly
Write publicly and get feedback from people

Writing Apps

We talked about how writing permeates all use cases. I personally use a combination of Slite (for work), and Notion and Roam Research (for personal).

I would avoid using Slack as the primary place to write, because of it's back-scrolling nature. It’s not a good place to store information that is organized hierarchically or relationally.

A wiki or a note-taking app is the best place to memorialize institutional decisions.

Is writing enough? What goes along with it?

Writing can sometimes be too abstract. You can supplement writing with different mediums.

To visualize a solution better — use a whiteboard, sketches, or wireframes.

To add nuance and tone to your communication, you could record audio or video along with a screenshare on an app like Loom.

The key is to avoid un-leveraged one-time communication.

Companies with a strong writing culture

Kavir @KavirKaycee

What are examples of companies that have a strong culture of writing? Apart from the famous examples of @amazon, @stripe, @gitlab, @gumroad etc

Further Resources:

The Remote Worker's Guide to Becoming a Better Writer – Doist

That's it for today. Let me know how you liked this article. Comment on this and I would love to discuss it with you!

Talk to you soon!

— Kavir

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