Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Year: 2020

  • Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right.

    The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your very best insights. It’s not uncommon that only the summary gets read. That’s actually a good thing. But it raises the stakes to get the summary right and you still need to put in the work – your summary will only be as good as the underlying work. But there are a few tips and tricks that helped me in the past.

    The basics

    What is an executive summary

    The summary is where good strategy projects start and end. It synthesizes the results including the recommendation or the implications of the work. Taken from the Wikipedia

    An executive summary […] summarizes a longer report […] in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all. […] It is intended as an aid to decision-making and has been described as the most important part of a business plan.

    Wikipedia – Executive Summary

    Three functions of a summary

    The summary can serve you in three ways. Most obviously, it summarizes your work into its most concise and compelling way. But there are two more applications:

    It can help you manage a project. Writing a hypothesis at the start of a project in the form of a summary helps you identify the main components that you need to understand to make a recommendation. Those can then become workstreams. Keeping your summary updated throughout a project helps you maintain focus and course correct where necessary. By the way, Amazon’s method of starting projects with the press release is this theory in action.

    Last, but not least, the summary is a rough outline for the narrative of the rest of your work. As such it provides you with an initial structure and the underlying logic. Having the summary first, will save you a lot of time later when you need to get the narrative right.

    When to use one

    So when is the best time to write the summary? Always! Start with the summary even if you don’t know all the details. This is your hypothesis or “one day answer”, i.e. what your instinct tells you after the first day of research. It will also tell you what you need to find out. Maintain your summary throughout the project and adapt it to new insights. Fine tune the summary at the end of your project to get it right. Over the course of this process the summary will change a lot as you learn, but it will make sure that you stay on course.

    As with everything, it takes practice and is uncomfortable at the start. And reading your first draft at the end of a project always is a mix of pride, because you got a few things right from the start, and utter cringe, because of how naïve you were. That is OK and part of the learning process.

    Below are a few concepts that helped me in the past.

    Structure, structure, structure

    Rocks and pebbles

    A lack of structure only confuses your reader. So, how to create a good one? A visualization might help. Imagine a roaring river and your job is to get your reader from one side to the other without getting their feet wet. To do this, you have to identify the rocks in the river that you can step on. Each is supported by a number of pebbles that give it stability. The rocks are your main points. The pebbles are supporting facts. Good summaries work with four to six rocks, each supported by three to five pebbles. Those numbers work well in my experience. You might need less, rarely more.

    Situation, complication, so what

    The tricky bit is now to know what kind of rocks you need. As any good story has an introduction, a middle part and an end, a good summary includes a description of the situation, the complication and a recommendation. The situation is a matter-of-fact description of the status quo. It should be uncontentious and give the reader sufficient context. The complication illustrates why we are looking into a situation. It tells the reader what the problem is. Last, but not least there should be conclusion or recommendation as in “What should we do about it?”.

    Break your writer’s block with Hulk speak

    Getting your structure right is hard. Often we get side tracked by finding the right words or shortening long sentences while we still haven’t cracked the overall structure. What helped me in the past is to revert to Hulk Speak:

    WRITING IS HARD
    YOU THINK TOO MUCH!
    WE HAVE A SOLUTION
    THE HULK SUMMARY!
    CHANNEL INNER HULK VOICE!
    BULLET LIST!
    FEW WORDS
    SAY IT. EFFECTIVE!
    NOW, SMASH CAR!

    Smash your writer’s block with The Hulk Summary

    Try it out and force yourself to less than five words per statement. It’s amazing how much it drives clarity. It forces you to use simple words and choose them carefully – you don’t get that many.

    Be brief

    Don’t be comprehensive

    It is tempting to give into the urge to show your sweat and write down all the good insights that you found out over the course of your research. Don’t. Just because you did a lot of research, doesn’t mean that your reader has to pay for it. Rather select the few relevant things that your reader should know. What is it that really matters. Very often that requires a healthy distance to your text. A good night of sleep and some fresh eyes in the morning can help cutting some of the unnecessary bits from your summary. And sometimes it is necessary to start new, ignoring your existing work and just tell the story again. Yes, you can reuse some of the old bits, but first we need to write down your cornerstones.

    Kill your darlings

    Use as little words as possible and as many as necessary. Over the course of a project your summary will breathe. It will expand as you learn more and it will contract as you make hard decisions and kill your darlings.

    This is one of the hardest parts. As you go through the motions of your project and update your summary on a regular basis, it will inevitably grow in length. At some point you have to be brave and cut. It will hurt, you won’t like it, but it is necessary. Don’t make your reader pay for all the good research you have done. Make the hard decisions about which pieces are critical and which are optional. Delete the optional ones. Set yourself arbitrary word count goals and cut, cut, cut. If you don’t want to do it, have somebody else read over the summary and cut the things they don’t think are necessary. In most cases you will disagree, but there is a good chance your editor is right.

    I recommend listening to them, follow their advice and implement their feedback even if you don’t like it. Then let it sit for a day or two and re-read the new version. Often you will realize that the new summary actually works, is more compact and just needs to be slightly tweaked.

    Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

  • In defense of email

    In defense of email

    Unpopular opinion: I like email.

    I remember distinctly when I got my very first email address. It was a mid-nineties summer in Germany and I finally got my hands on a modem. That was a big deal, as it required me sending a cashier’s check via mail to a business that I didn’t know, wait for seven or eight weeks with no status update to receive a no-name modem with at best spotty documentation. After dabbling in local BBSes and QWK readers, I signed up for a BBS that was connected to Fidonet which meant that my online community was no longer restricted to the local area code. Fidonet provided access to a global network of nodes that replicated messages with each other via dial up. Because of dial up messages were replicated between nodes only a few times per day. Therefore it could take days for messages to travel from sender to recipient, but this was a global network.

    Part of that deal was an email address. Admittedly, one that took days to deliver, but one that allowed me to communicate with people on the other side of the world without long distance calls. That left an immense impression on me and I remember going outside to tell the great news to my father who was working in the garden. After all it was summer. I told him about how it was all connected and that I could send emails to people in places like America. He just looked at me, baffled, and just commented that I didn’t know anybody in the US. He was right, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my English was broken or that my email address was a lengthy and random assortment or letters and numbers. What mattered was the possibility.

    While I didn’t know any Americans, Australians or even Austrians at that time, email allowed me to change that. Email established itself as the lowest common denominator and as such allowed me to reach out to people, stay in touch with friends and current and former work colleagues, independent of country, company, operating system, device or phone carrier.

    That’s now more than a quarter of a century ago. There are still a lot of things that I appreciate very much about email:

    • Email addresses have proven to be durable. After the first wave of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, people (at least in my generation) have settled on one main email address that has been stable over the last ten or so years. The fact that a lot of services use the email address as the unique identifier for logging in just underscores this kind of perseverance.
    • Email is permission-less. As soon as I have somebody’s address, I can reach out to that person. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, most notably spam and harassment that are real and that I don’t want to downplay. But the fact that I don’t need to be part of a specific network to be able to connect with somebody still seems wonderfully egalitarian to me.
    • Email has little friction through authentication. So much information these days is hidden behind paywalls, which are notorious for erring on the side of false negatives. As soon as a cookie is not ad-related it seems to expire much faster leading to unnerving extra authentication hoops to jump through. I get a lot of my news and analysis via email, which removes that friction. The information just comes to me.
    • Email creates a searchable repository. Randy Pausch once said that email storage is basically free (so much goodness in his time management presentation, this tidbit is slide 87). The day I realized that was the last day I deleted email. And its rich meta information allows for powerful search, filters and sorting. Over the years I’ve given up on folders and labels and mostly rely on search. It works. There is always something about an email that I remember, be it a date, the sender, a list of recipients, … that all can be used as part of the search criteria.
    • Email clients are mature. While there are every now and then slightly new approaches to email clients, the problem seems mostly solved. Most email clients provide sufficient features and good enough keyboard support to be able to manage email swiftly and with little mental overhead.
    • Emails are inherently asynchronous. Everybody can deal with email at their own pace. For some it means that they reply to most emails within 5 minutes, others try to comply with the 24-hour rule, others just … don’t. And that is fine. The fact that there are no “the other person is typing” indicator, slows things down enough to allow for thoughtful replies.

    These are only a few of the things I appreciate about email. It is easy to hate on email these days and get broad support. It has lots of downsides, most notably that it can feel at times overwhelming. Email has been declared dead many times and a lot of systems are chipping away on its value proposition. As with most things, it is just a tool. But it has proven to be simple, reliable and durable enough to survive the last five decades and probably a few more.

    One last thought: As mentioned above, I’m originally from Germany. Over time I’ve had the privilege to live in the UK, Australia and now in the US. And every single time it started with me reaching out to somebody that I didn’t know with an email. Only email can do that.

    Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

  • Timely advice from the Wu Tang Clan

    W – Wash hands

    U – Use masks properly

    T –Touch nothing

    A – Avoid crowds

    N – Never touch your face with unwashed hands

    G – Go to the hospital if you have severe symptoms

    Wu Tang Clan on Instagram

  • The case of the missing hit

    Such a great podcast episode about a song that seems to have vanished from the internet. Totally amazed by the lengths to which the team has gone to solve the mystery:

    A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

    Reply All #158 The Case of the Missing Hit

    Best quote:

    “The only way to cure an earworm is to listen to it. But what do you do when that song no longer seems to exist?”

  • How to get more out of OneNote

    OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I’ve only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team.

    I recently saw an unanswered tweet asking for help about OneNote and thought this might be an opportunity to share some of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate about OneNote over the last two years.

    Two caveats up front:

    1. I use the Windows app. Therefore all shortcuts and features are Windows. But I’m pretty sure most is supported on the Mac/ web version. Happy to update if there is interest.
    2. I use the OneNote for Windows 10 app, not OneNote 2016 that most people seem to be familiar with. I greatly prefer the former given how snappy it is and how the interface feels more modern.

    With that out of the way, let’s begin exploring some of the aspects in which OneNote can make your life easier:

    Using keyboard shortcuts

    As with every app it pays off to invest time to learn keyboard shortcuts. OneNote is no exception and reciprocates with great keyboard support. Below are a few of shortcuts that are non-obvious that I find most helpful:

    • CTRL+1: Create a little checkbox next to the paragraph to mark as a todo. Pressing CTRL+1 again will check that box.
    • CTRL+2: Mark a paragraph with a star for future reference. Helpful to highlight important statements when taking notes to go back to later.
    • Ctrl + G: Switch Notebook – Once you start using OneNote with multiple teams you will work with lots of notebooks. This shortcut will help you keep your flow even if you have to switch notebooks.
    • Ctrl+Shift+G: Switch sections within a notebook. The little sister of Ctrl+G.
    • Ctrl+E: Search. Always great when you are lost to just use search to find what you’ve been looking for.
    • Ctrl+M: Create new window. Especially when you work with lots of display real estate, it helps to be able to have multiple notes open simultaneously.
    • Alt+Shift+Up/Down: Move a paragraph up or down within a text. Might sound obscure but I use it quite frequently when jotting down ideas and playing with the right structure.
    • Alt+Shift+Left/Right: Indent/ un-indent a paragraph. OneNote is a great outliner and those last two shortcuts are the centerpieces.
    • Ctrl+ . and Ctrl+/: Create a bullet or numbered list.

    Microsoft has an overview of all shortcuts. If you have five minutes, I recommend browsing through them and see what catches your fancy.

    Structuring your documents

    OneNote has great features to structure your documents. Bullet list are rock solid and I’ve never had a problem with them breaking (I’m looking at you, Word or Outlook). Using Alt+Shift+Left/Right makes it easy to in- and decrease indentation.

    Bonus feature: Once you have a good structure with indentation, you can use Alt+Shift+ +/- to expand and collapse structures. When you are working with larger notes this feature can help to hide some of the complexity (speak “messiness”). Keeps the brain sane.

    Last but not least, OneNote also has something that it calls “tags”. You can add little checkboxes, stars and whatever else you want next to a paragraph. This is a great feature if you want to highlight action items or key statements when taking notes. You can easily assign them on the fly using Ctrl+1 or Ctrl+2 or … you get it. You can even define your own custom tags for OneNote.

    Removing distractions

    Pressing F11 will get you into full screen mode. No more distractions, just a large canvas to write/ paint on. You will lose all icons for text formatting, but since you know your keyboard shortcuts, that won’t matter to you.

    In case it does, just press the “Show/ Hide Navigation” button on the left and you will just get some more horizontal space.

    Creating hyperlinks

    OneNote allow to link notebooks, sections and single notes. Just right click on any of them and select “Copy link to section/ page/ …”. Inserting that link in your documents works like in most editors that support hyperlinks: Ctrl+K is your friend.

    Unfortunately, OneNote lost the ability to create a table of contents that allows you to link within a note. But most notes are short enough anyway and using the expand/ collapse paragraphs feature should help compensate for it.

    Finding your stuff

    Yes, at times it gets confusing between notebooks, sections and notes. Search is your friend. While I haven’t seen that OneNote supports proper hashtags with linking, it typically works quite well to just insert hastags and use them in the search (Ctrl+E).

    The other tip to find your notes is to use “Show recent notes”. Across all your most recently used notebooks it will show you a chronological list of most recent notes (duh). This feature has saved by bottom quite a few times when I created notes that I couldn’t find anymore.

    That’s it. There are a lot more great features such as inserting meeting details and attendants from your calendar, using the pen to scribble things or if you’re really into it I recommend following the OneNote twitter account for more tips, but let’s keep it short. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but hopefully will help somebody get their work done in a more delightful way.