Today, we communicate through writing more than ever. Both remote and on-site employees collaborate in work chat, wikis, and project management platforms, where face-to-face conversation used to do the job.
The larger percentage of our day spent writing rather than speaking isn’t all bad. It gives us time to communicate more thoughtfully than the stream-of-thought pace of conversation allows. The downside is that writing can feel like a time sink, and there’s a temptation to minimize the effort we put into it.
Cutting corners on written quality, however, is the worst of all worlds. Writing is a major advantage precisely because it forces us to clarify our thinking in ways that conversation can’t. Churning out sloppy messages creates confusion that’s expensive to untangle, since you’ve lost the fast clarification loop a real conversation gives you. Unclear writing saves the writer time at the reader’s expense, and puts the onus on the reader to keep asking what you meant.
Taking the extra minute to refine a Slack message or email can prevent hours or days lost to misinterpretation. Under-appreciating the written form is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Whether you go full Amazon memo-driven meetings or just spend a minute tightening up a brain dump before you hit send, the time pays off in the future productivity of yourself and everyone reading your messages.