Chekov's advice - Repurposed for work documents

I suck at writing strategy type documents, and I have hated them since business school. Something about a mandatory 5-page document used to make me extremely uneasy, especially when one great visual could do the trick.

In order to not write those documents, I ended up taking a lot of independent studies with professors who were ok with non-traditional final outputs like an info-graphic or freeform blogposts.

Unfortunately, you can't find a similar way out of that at work.

Recently while I was struggling with a document, I came across Chekov's advice on writing. It really helped me review and cut my verbose content into half. He intended it for writing in general, but it helped me get a little better at writing the mandatory docs :). It might help you too:

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature: Or as we would say it today, Keep It Simple.
2. Total objectivity: This is key in the work context. When writing a strategy or a plan for something that you are leading, you might get blindsided because you are so focused on making stuff happen. Writing gives you the opportunity to take a step back and be objective about your decisions, so use it as a tool in the process rather than as an afterthought for documentation.
3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects: I take this to mean truthful depiction of the past. We try to rationalize the past. That never helps in learning from it.
4. Extreme brevity: TL;DR (even as I look at this post, just the graphic was enough)
5. Audacity and originality - flee the stereotype: I interpret this as there being no need to stick to formats and templates. Write what conveys your ideas best, even if it means beginning with a story instead of an introduction.
6. Compassion: I see it as understanding who the recipient of the work is. Do they have the time to go though every detail you just put in or are they looking for the high level points and deciding which one to dig into?

As you can see from this post, I have still a long way to go when it comes to writing. I still feel Chekov's points can help everyone.

And by the way, that document that I so proudly cut down to half, well, when I took it to my boss, he cut it down by another half! But that is for another post :)