Ask HN: How to write documents quicker?

What if you turned it from a solitary activity to a pair activity. e.g. ask a trusted peer to take notes as you explain the design of your system with whiteboard. Then clean up the notes and drawings. The peer could also point out issues or common questions in real time allowing your doc to address them proactively.

Just an idea.

Two things to try:

1. Outline the next thing you write, before you write it. It sounds like rewriting as you write is a problem. Outlining gets you out of that habit like few other things can. It forces you to focus on what you're trying to convey and who you want to address.

2. You didn't mention anything about you HN (or other media) use. If you're using that as a way to escape, it's time to stop.

Do you find it easier to explain things by speaking?

If so, get yourself a dictaphone (or use an app that does the same). Record everything you want to say, spoken out loud - it doesn't matter if it's disjointed or informal, you can fix that later. Then play it back and type it in.

If it helps, imagine you're explaining things to another person (or a rubber duck) when you're doing the talking.

Your only task then is to edit it to be more in written style than spoken style, which hopefully will be much easier.

The only other thing I can think of is, maybe you are too stressed to write words down? From what you said, it sounds like you are very anxious about making a mistake.

Perhaps grab a book on self-control and building discipline (Atomic Habits is good), even if you don't need to write often, it can help you to procrastinate less.

For the other part (over-perfectioning) really try to write a whole document before starting to review it. You can start small, eg. say to yourself "If i write for 30 without looking back or rewriting any word, I'll allow myself to make edits for 15 minutes".

I know is hard, I have a similar problem (even if not that acute). But is actually much more efficient to edit at the end, than all the time.

If you write a lot, you should already have plenty of material. Don't start from scratch every time. Whatever information or notes you have should be your starting point. I have an archive of notes and thoughts with hundreds of thousands of words that I can draw on. For me, writing a document is more about pulling together the stuff I have, not about creating new stuff. Of course, I don't just jam together my notes, I have an outline or structure in mind, and craft the finished document by editing and organizing.

Do you code like this as well or is this specific only to writing docs? If it's just docs, then honestly, it sounds like you just really hate working on them even though you can do a good job.

Find a distraction that has a shorter time to get done, and say/think to yourself "after this thing I'll add something to the document", and then if you're not sure how to continue from your current point, try to write the section headings or subheadings for an upcoming section. You can do a lot out of order and fill in the spaces as the inspiration pops up.

I usually do a youtube video, go for a walk, or eat for the distraction, and then make some kind of attempt at progress, even if it's just formatting stuff. Setting up all the sections and page numbers and whatever else at the start helps me too, bc I think it's just annoying to try and highlight things to change after writing.

My order is usually: Set up Title/headings/subheadings, font/size/style settings, rough draft of intro for each section, notes/major points for each section, fix any format issues that affect the entire document or an entire section and will not be reinstated by adding more content, flesh out the content in each section (and do not mess with format during this bc as you add more content it will change again anyway), grammar/writing style edit, final format edit.

I approach writing like I approach coding. First, I do a "breadth first" plan of what I'm going to write (i.e., I define the ToC for the doc, first).

Then I go through the headers and just bang in a few quick-and-dirty bulletpoints under each heading -- and I do that all the way through the document.

If it needs diagrams, I hand-draw them roughly, take a photo with my phone and copy-paste them in.

Then I do a third pass where I come back, flesh out the bullet points into paragraphs, and spend some time in Excalidraw knocking out the diagrams.

Finally, I do a fourth pass, to tidy up stuff.

The benefit of this approach is that it allows you to compartmentalise the different cognitive requirements into phases. Phase 1: planning, Phase 2: idea capture, Phase 3: wordsmithing and diagramming, Phase 4: proofreading

This approach works really well for me.