Not Fun but Worth It: Write Everything Down

Writing everything down seems so simple in concept, but it’s harder to execute. The path to oblivion is paved with good intentions. “Dang, I should have written that down a month ago…”

There’s four main reasons in our business that I write everything down.

• Take the lead in negotiating agreements
• Giving names to important things
• Multiplying your impact
• Enable search and retrieval for everyone

Take the lead in negotiating agreements

In my twenties, someone taught me: “The party with the pen wins.” Solid wisdom, which has proven its value for me many times. As the subtitle of this article suggests, people don’t like taking the time to write things down. It’s laborious, tedious, and exhausting for many. Regardless, I have seen many times that when our team writes down an agreement with a counterparty, no matter how informal, we can refer back to it later in a moment where there is confusion or disagreement. Whether the context is a legal contract, an introductory agreement or just setting and reinforcing expectations about how to execute a task: the party with the pen wins. I also find that taking the lead in writing things down gives us advantages related to our counterparty in terms of our key interests.

Giving names to important things

Whether you are selling a product, a project, or an internal initiative, I have found that giving those things names that are short, memorable, and acronym-able is a winning strategy. Too many times, when pitching a concept to a client, if you refer to it as a concrete name, such as “Marketing Analytics Platform (MAP)”, the client can more easily take emotional ownership and build consensus internally around it. Using that name repeatedly in pitch decks, proposals, and meeting agendas makes it far more clear “what are we talking about in this meeting”.

Multiplying your impact

When the number of people negotiating an agreement is much smaller than the number of people executing the work related to that agreement (which is most of the time), writing everything down creates clarity and reduces time wasted later on. Assume that your counterparty (whether a client or a prime/sub contractor, etc.) probably doesn’t communicate as clearly with their team as you would like them to. Put yourselves in the shoes of the counterparty’s executives and write the document for them as the primary audience, as much as for your own team. A month from now when your team’s program managers are re-introducing tasks and objectives for execution, it is always satisfying to know you these documents defining the tasks to be completed in your pocket.

Using search and tools to make retrieval easier

Cognitive science informs us that our brains are built for perception, storage, and retrieval. However, retrieval from long-term memory takes work, and let’s face it, we’re fallible, especially when the number of things we have to remember are many and the pace is fast. Instead of committing everything only to the memory in our brains, get it down on paper (of course we’re talking about digital paper here). In our business, we use tools like Evernote for informal note taking and Confluence for more formal documents that we want to share with internal team members. When sharing agreements with third parties, we always publish documents to PDF to build in permanency, protection (via passwords and encryption) and authenticity (via digital signatures). The use of AI tools like retrieval augmented generation can make this even more powerful, though in most cases, these simpler tools suffice.