Smart Brevity and LLMs

I've adopted Smart Brevity and LLMs into my writing in the past year.

Smart Brevity was the most impactful book I read last year (or it was at least tied with How Big Things Get Done). I improved my work communication significantly. Great techniques in the book, but my biggest takeaway was this simple question: "What is the one thing I want my reader to takeaway?" Then just... write that one thing!

It's been interesting to add LLMs into my writing toolbox at the same time.

2 thoughts.

• If you use LLMs to write, use them to make your writing shorter, not longer
• By the time I put together bullet points of context for an LLM to have it draft something, I've already done the hard work of deciding what is important to say. Most the time I can then just post those bullet-points as-is.

Regarding the second point: maybe I should try dumping all my messy thoughts into an LLM and see if it can identify 1-3 key takeaways for me.