Myth 1: I don’t have time to plan
By Allen Palmer
This is the first of a series of articles exploring widely held misconceptions that diminish many workplace writers’ efficiency and effectiveness.
Most writers don’t plan because they think it only increases the time pressure they’re already under. But writing without a plan doesn’t reduce your time to first draft and almost inevitably creates headaches in the edit. If you embrace planning, you’ll find it saves time, restores control and improves the effectiveness of your documents.
Most writers don’t plan for reasons that sound sensible
Are you a planner or a pantser? Do you map out the shape of a document before you start, or do you start typing and fly by the seat of your …?
By my estimate, around 90–95% of writers are the latter. I know this because it’s a question I ask in the first half hour of all my workshops. If I have 10 people in the room, I’ll be lucky if I get 1 person who admits to being a planner.
And they won’t generally be planning evangelists. They might say they sort of plan. Sometimes. If they have time. Someone else might say they used to plan at uni, but stopped when they reached the workplace. Why? Don’t have time.
If you don’t plan, you’re in good company. I’ve trained a lot of very smart, very capable writers who don’t plan. They will say they are incredibly busy, they’re working to tight turnarounds and they just can’t
afford ‘the luxury’ of planning.
Hard to argue with. The clock is ticking. Your manager is on your case. We need that document ASAP! The rational response in that situation is to scream and start typing. Surely, the sooner you start writing the document, the sooner you’ll finish it. Sounds indisputable. But is it?
Starting fast doesn’t necessarily mean finishing first
Think tortoise, think hare.
When I ask people if they see any downside to writing without planning, some will acknowledge that the first draft can come painfully slowly. This is partly because, with each sentence and paragraph, you’re constantly facing the scary question, ‘OK, where to now?’ You’re slowed even more because it’s likely you’ll endlessly finesse each sentence and paragraph, possibly because that’s easier than answering the question, ‘OK, where to now?’
But more often they’ll talk about inefficiencies that only appear after they’ve completed the first draft. They will complain about how long it takes to edit that draft. Why is this more of an issue with an unplanned document? Because, without a plan, invariably that first draft – what I call a ‘dump draft’ – is structurally flawed:
- Key information is buried.
- There’s too much or too little detail.
- The detail is fragmented and repeated.
And fixing structural flaws is no fun. It is mentally taxing, and it takes a lot of time – time you probably don’t have. So that whole ‘planning is the thief of time’ thesis is starting to look a little shaky. But I still haven’t reached my biggest reservation about not planning.
An unplanned document is more likely to prattle than persuade
Apart from time, the other reason people launch into typing is that they have a jumble of ideas in their heads, and they want to use that first dump draft to clarify their thinking. I get that. And I know that this first draft, however imperfect, will help you work out what it is that you want to say.
The problem is that, because you weren’t quite sure what you wanted to say, the document’s structure won’t powerfully say what you now know you want to say. It will more often be a long-winded narrative of what you know about the issue. This is a related but worse issue than the one I raised earlier.
Yes, unplanned documents will tend to be bloated, meandering and repetitious. This will make them long, hard to read and frustrating for time-poor decision-makers. But unplanned documents also tend not to make a compelling argument.
And this could mean your board paper, briefing note, tender or report doesn’t get endorsed. What is that going to cost you?
Planning helps you make haste, slowly
We tend to know the expression as ‘More haste, less speed’. But in its original Latin, it was ‘Festina lente’, which translates as ‘Make haste slowly’. I find that more powerful, and I learned this lesson the hard way.
As both a screenwriter and a copywriter, I was originally a pantser, and things were not going well for me. In the quest for speed, I had shunned planning but found I was, contrary to expectation, slow and ineffective. I could not have survived if I’d kept writing that way.
I could not keep producing a first draft that was so far from final draft. It had to be structurally sound, or we simply wouldn’t have time to salvage it. Writing, I concluded, was a very inefficient way of thinking. So, against the habits of a lifetime, I started planning.
I started by sketching ideas with a pad and pencil, but now I use mind-mapping apps. iThoughts is currently my app of choice. But you can jot down your thoughts in Word or OneNote, or collaborate with co-authors in Miro. Whatever you use, you’ll find planning can transform your writing process.
Why? Because it lets you get the benefits of the first dump draft – sorting that jumble of ideas in your head – in a fraction of the time and without locking you into a flawed structure.
Your ideas are out there in front of you, and you can start marshalling those thoughts into a more coherent and compelling shape. It allows you to work out what you want to say – before you’ve fully said it – and then sharpen your structure to say it more persuasively.
It doesn’t have to be a perfect plan
I’m not suggesting you’ll create a plan, and that your document will perfectly match that plan. That can happen. But more often, as you write, you’ll get fresh insights that can improve the document.
Writing becomes an iterative process – plan, write a little, adjust the plan, write some more, adjust and so on. I’m not asking you to entirely give up your pantser persona – just give a little more voice to the neglected planner inside all of us.
If you do, I think it’s likely you’ll come around.
I now think that writing without planning is a bit like getting on a train to go to Brisbane, and laying the track as you go. Not only will that trip be slow and tedious, by the time you finally get there, you’ll probably realise you should have been pointing towards Perth.
While many claim they don’t have time to plan, I’ve now swung a full 180. My view is that, if you’re under time pressure, you can’t afford not to plan.
For more advice about planning your writing:
- visit the free Australian Style Guide™
- contact us about our ISO-aligned workshops.
