To save some valuable lessons gleaned from this youtube video by Conor Neill, I am making this post as a reminder for myself.
Writing is thinking. Writing and editing are meant to be two separate processes. When we start writing something or getting thoughts down, it should be somewhat structured, but mostly a vomit of all thoughts and words. Little to no attention should be paid to the organization, correct word choice if it’s not immediately known, or perhaps even spelling and fact-checking.
Once there’s sufficient words (500 or more), it may be time to stop and go back to enter the editing phase. During this phase, we can reorganize sentences, reword things, fact check and more.
By making the process of writing free from editing, it seems that we may be able to extract much more out of our mental map of this original idea or thought that we’re deciding to write out.
So to apply this, I could start writing my protocols with a far more extensive summary than the way I have been doing it, trying to make it neat and organized on the first try.
There’s no upside to making things clear from the beginning. It seems like it saves time, but does it ever? We would probably be served much better to do what Conor Neill suggests. Maybe doing 5 edits after the first 500 word vomit actually saves time in the pursuit of putting together an ideal or perfect arrangement of the thoughts we wanted to capture in the first place.