Dealing with constant writers block
The make up of my firm's IC has changed and they're now asking our group to submit memos as opposed to decks. This has caused some serious writers block and I'm now (really) struggling to churn out my work, let alone produce high quality work... It's super frustrating because I never had this issue before... it would be helpful to hear from others who dealt with / overcame writers block under a similar context.
Ask ChatGPT to write it and go from there. I’m kidding but only slightly - sometimes having a starting place is all you need
Outline to get your thoughts focused. Take the deck you would usually create and turn the key points into an outline.
Don't worry about the perfect first draft, just get words on a piece of paper. Once you have a first draft, take a breather. After your breather, come back and mark it up. Keep doing that until it's done.
Both of those help me get through the daunting task of creating a full write up.
Agree with this. Just write whatever comes to mind, it'll be better than you think. Then refine / add data points etc.
See if theres a precedent from another team you can leverage for the first go
What I do in these situations is just write all my thoughts in bullet points first, then gradually combine/cut/rearrange them into flowing sentences.
Same here. I just free flow in bullet forms without caring about syntax or word choice...first pass is always about just getting all the points down on a page as quickly as possible before I lose it, then the next passes after that are about fixing and cleaning up into real sentence format.
Although it’s in memo form, you should still be able to make a template that you update each time. It won’t be as easy as a ppt template, but you shouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel in terms of memo structure. This will help some with writers block as a decent chunk of your writing won’t change very much, just core details. Easiest way to cure writers block in my experience is to start with as little blank space as possible. You would have this same problem if you started with a blank PPT every time.
PPT > word. Hate when firms do this. They have to hide behind 20 pagers that could be summarized in a ppt with an appendix and model
Turn what was each slide into headers for new sections of the memo. Have done both and I always just switched between the two pretty easily by structuring both fairly similarly. With the memo you just expound more on the bullets you would’ve put in the slide.
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