Writing vs formatting

I read a really interesting article from iA the other day about focused writing and what happens when our minds drift towards structure or format.

It discusses that us human types are not good at multitasking and it creates inefficiency, especially when we’re focusing on writing. Writing is hard, so choosing the right font, colour or playing with icons and images to tell a story becomes a happy distraction. Unfortunately, this distraction ends up taking up valuable time. We want to make beautiful content, but spending time aligning the perfect icons without the text is a time sink. 

It’s true too, even as I write this in plain text, I want to go off and link to that article and make this post look beautiful!

I discussed this point with my content team at work and it was generally agreed that it’s too easy to get wrapped up in design and templates, when really, we should write our ideas down first. I tend to build content in layers, with restructuring as I go. It’s not efficient and I recognise that, but it’s how I’ve worked.

Certainly, as content creators, we need to consider structure and apply a degree of instructional design to our assets. Quite often, structure, or often, restructuring tends to happen while writing, particularly during the outline stage. If we write in small blocks, it becomes easy to move them to create a cohesive structure and narrative.

All this to say, I should try to become more mindful and get the words down first.