Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say.
Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :)
Then write it down.
You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done”
It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.
Me too. Try speech to text one day, you may find that you'll use 2x the words than you do with a typed vomit draft. I was surprised
Don't you get dinged as a slow performer? Management expects x5 speed on everything now that AI is available.
No because the document is not the work. Management wants someone to figure out the solution to their problems. The document is just a step in solutioning.
Without the doc, others would have to re-do all that work if you get hit by a bus. Or you’d be stuck in endless meetings conveying the vision instead of figuring out the next problem.
Document length is inversely proportional to the quality of your thinking/insight. When you create fluff, everyone can see you didn’t do the work.
If your boss asks you for specific documents and expects a quick turnaround, and you regularly take 3 weeks or whatever to produce them, then yeah probably.
If your boss generally leaves you alone to find and solve problems on your own, then probably not.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal
Brevity is an art, and it is hard.
I've gotten better at phrasing myself adequately in one go. Rute mechanical memorization has also made writing itself cheaper. (read my username)
I can now yap quite adequately over text, yet i regularly find AIs at a minimum 2x as verbose as my preferred phrasing after manual word mashing.
An odd tradeoff of my verbal-based writing seems to be that I am a fairly slow reader. I read aloud in my head, albeit a bit faster than I could speak, but I still hear the words as an internal monologue.
When discussing this a few times with friends, I've learned how different everyone's experiences are when bridging thoughts=>speaking, thoughts=>writing, thoughts=>typing, and text=>thoughts (or even text=>understanding).