Communicate Better with One Pagers

A lot of "work" consists of large volumes of low information writing

At work, we're reading and writing all day—texts, emails (often with long chains), messages, channel posts, chats. We constantly monitor multiple streams of short, transactional, conversational messages, emails, and posts.

This is a huge amount of communication. Yet it has a low information density.

We're also talking on the phone, and going to meetings, where we talk some more. Sometimes, we get to read presentations. Really long presentations with lots of preamble, discussion, tables and graphs, and appendices. Sometimes there is a clear point.

This means we have to wade through a lot of texting and talking to chip away at our problem. That problem is trying to get a sufficient amount of the right information to do one of three things:

1. Define a business thing, problem, or opportunity

2. Decide to do the thing, and prioritize it against other efforts, or not do the thing

3. Understand what happened with a thing—Get a report of outcomes, progress, results, findings, and what to do about it

Low information density in our communications makes it difficult and time consuming to gain full understanding and then decide with confidence.

Break through the noise with a One Pager strategy

Win friends and influence people by adding a new tool to your communication strategy: The one pager. It's a single sheet—real or digital, but real is often better—that contains:

• A clear, concise definition of the topic or proposal, or reporting of findings

• A distillation and aggregation of all and only the relevant supporting information in an easy-to-scan format

• Pros & cons

• Costs & benefits, plus CODN (cost of doing nothing)

• Implementation: Ease or difficulty, with remedies to possible problems

• Dependencies, impact on others

• Pro Tip: Take a stance in your one pager that will force the readers to react. Use the one pager to declare what you intend to do unless you hear otherwise. If there are choices, identify your recommended option and why. If there are priorities, stack rank them and identify which ones are for now and which ones will be backlogged. If there are multiple next steps, state the one you will take immediately. If you need action from others, make your ask.

Communication strategy with one pagers:

• Send out 24-48 hours ahead of time

• Meet

• Present and/or distribute your one pager

• Discuss

• Take note of any adjustments, changes, and most importantly, the decision

• Issue a revised one pager with the decision stated explicitly

One pagers are approachable and easy to deal with, yet their high information density cuts through the usual fog of business. They save time. They promote focused discussion. They clarify decision making. They promote consensus and action.

Notebooks Make You Smarter

It started innocently enough.

In my earlier career, working on UX projects for Fortune 500 companies, I needed a way to keep track of all the insights, facts, diagrams, players, requirements, and plain old to-do's.

So I returned to a habit I thought I had left behind: Taking notes in a physical notebook. Now, 20-mumble years on, I am never without a notebook. I take notes on everything: Books, podcasts, meetups, conferences, Twitter threads, everything. And I have a whole system of physical notebooks with handwritten notes.

Why?

The research is long in: Handwritten notes make your brain remember concepts better. When you activate the hand-brain connection to write, you process information more deeply. You can condense, restate, annotate, illustrate, and cross-reference other entries. Most importantly, you will remember information better. When you talk, you'll have more substantive, better structured things to say from memory.

My current notebook lineup includes:

Morning pages notebook

Daily mind dump...automatic writing in a big, cheap spiral bound notebook like you had in the eighth grade. Get your swirling thoughts down on paper so focused thinking can begin.

UX work notebook

Big, sturdy Rhodias. Always at hand. Every note & to-do goes here. With these handwritten records, I can reconstruct the memory of a meeting, utterance, or decision going back months (if you choose to keep them). 1st IA, flow diagrams, and wireframes happen here. https://rhodiapads.com/collections_spiral_4colorbook.php

Professional/Industry notebook

Small, softback Leuchtturm handbooks (fit in any bag or coat pocket) for professional training notes, meetups, conferences, speaker notes, business book notes and especially deconstructed podcasts. Indexed and saved when full. https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/notebook-classic.html

Personal journal and commonplace book

Small, hardback Leuchtturm notebooks that house my own journal entries. It's also a commonplace book: A copied record of anything good from your reading, watching or anyplace else. Memorable quotes, pithy tweets, excerpts from fiction and non-fiction, recipes, whole poems. Indexed and saved when full. Writer Ryan Holliday says more: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

Pro Tip: Make an Index for Your Notebook

• Save 4-5 blank pages at the front of each notebook. Label them "Index"

• Number the pages of your notebook. Or buy pre-numbered notebooks

• When your notebook is full, review the pages for what's good. These will go in your index

• Give each important topic or concept a descriptive line on an Index page. Add the page number or range

• If the topic appears in multiple places in your notes, keep the single line item for it in the index. Add additional page numbers or page ranges next to it

• Later, to find a note, you only need to scan the index, not flip through all the pages

Morning Pages: Clear Your Mind, Fight Dopamine Addiction

What if there was a way you could clear your mind, strengthen your ability to show up, and also push back on your smartphone social media dopamine-hit-addicting doomscrolling?

There's a way that's working for me, and it might work for you, too.

It's called Morning Pages. It's a writing practice launched by Julia Cameron in her book, "The Artist's Way." https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

Morning pages are a stream-of-consciousness writing practice meant to clear the mind and get it ready to do real writing work. Or get ready for whatever your work is. It's throwaway writing, like sweeping your mind of the night's detritus.

And it's just 3 longhand pages a day, every morning. Write anything and everything that comes to your mind. Your dreams, your worries, your fears, and even silly, useless thoughts. Just get them out of your head and onto paper.

Sometimes a good idea pops up in your morning writing routine. You'd be surprised. Copy it over to another notebook or to your digital notes.

"There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages—they are not high art. They are not even 'writing.'” —Julia Cameron

Added bonus: If you sit down to Morning Pages first thing every day, then you're training yourself not to pick up your phone. That's less doomscrolling social media, checking email, scanning Slack channels, and the million other little time wasters that give us that morning dopamine hit we are all hooked on. Doing Morning Pages weans you from your morning phone addiction.

How to Do Morning Pages

1. Buy a fat, cheap composition notebook. The cheaper the better. You're not actually going to keep this notebook—You'll toss it, shred it, burn it when it's full.

2. Get some pens or pencils

3. Find a morning writing spot and put your notebook and pen there.

4. At night, hide your phone away or turn it off. Keep it out of your writing spot.

5. First thing in the morning (with a stop for coffee), sit down and start writing without thinking. Just keep your pen moving.

6. Stop when you hit 3 pages. Some days, my flow stops at 1 or 2 pages. That's OK.

7. Repeat every day for a few weeks.

8. Start enjoying a calmer mind and a cooler relationship to your phone

Writing My Way Forward

Social feeds stuffed with videos, streaming television and films, an explosion of digital gaming of all types...this is our Internet now. This has led many pundits to say that the age of the written word is over. They say we are becoming a visual image and spoken word culture once again...modern primitives, in a way.

But here and there, in corners of our digital culture, writing seems to be making a comeback. Or more precisely, writing seems to be appreciated by more and more people for the focus and weight it can offer to our distracted minds and noisy world. These people are the real knowledge workers of today: People who seek to clarify their thinking on topics that matter to them. These thoughts can also be put into the world to help others and influence things for the better. Thoughts that are honed through writing seem to survive better in our chaotic digital culture. We want to find like-minded friends, allies, contacts, and employers. We may even want to find ourselves. For all of these goals, there is no substitute for writing.

Recently, I've been browsing and trying a variety of writing techniques. So far, the ones that have stuck are morning pages and making reading notes in journals. But both of these are background activities. Something is missing.

The missing piece is becoming a daily writer. To that end, I've joined up with the Ship 30 for 30 folks. My fellow writers and I will be sending our Atomic Essays into the world, one a day for the next 30 days.

On my left is the pile of my experience of life. I am knee-deep. I must process it, compost stuff, maybe even uncover something long buried.

On my right is the way forward, but there is no path.

Writing, I will make bricks, one by one. I'll uncover the good stuff in the pile. And brick by brick, I will build a path, even though I don't know where it may lead.