Writing guides
From meeting notes and weekly reports to PRDs, retrospectives, blog drafts and reading notes. Every guide links to a ready-to-use template.
How to Write Meeting Notes People Actually Reread
Meeting notes are not a transcript, they are a record of decisions. Here is the structure and habit that make notes worth rereading, with bad and good examples side by side.
WorkHow to Write a Weekly Report in Five Minutes
Weekly reports take long not because of writing skill, but because you are reconstructing a week from memory. Build the report from one line a day and a done-next-blocked structure, and Friday afternoon is yours again.
WorkHow to Write a PRD Engineers Can Act On
A good PRD opens with the problem, not a feature list. This guide walks through non-goals, verifiable requirement sentences and success metrics set before launch, with examples of each.
WorkRunning a KPT Retrospective That Actually Changes Things
Teams whose retrospectives go nowhere confuse naming a problem with fixing it. This is the Keep-Problem-Try flow, a 60-minute time split, and how to carry experiments through to the next retro.
PersonalWhy You Cannot Finish That Blog Post, and the Order That Fixes It
A day of writing and deleting the same paragraph is not a talent problem, it is an order problem. This guide separates drafting from editing: push a terrible draft all the way to the end first, then bring it to life in revision.
PersonalA Reading Notes System for Books You Do Not Want to Forget
When a finished book fades to a vague impression within a week, memory is not the culprit. This guide introduces a three-part note structure that goes past underlining, into your own words and application, backed by memory research.
WorkWhat Actually Belongs in a Handover Document
Handover documents get thick not because there is a lot to hand over, but because nobody knows what to hand over. Derive the outline backwards from where your successor actually gets stuck in week one, and the page gets shorter while it gets more useful.
PersonalWhy the Cornell Method Still Beats Typing Faster
Lecture notes are won in the minutes after class, not by hand speed. The longhand-beats-laptop consensus already wobbled under replication, and what separated the scores was transcription, not the tool.
WorkWhat Makes a Work Email Get a Fast Reply
A reply is not late because the email is long. It is late because the reader has to search for what to do and by when. Here is the order that puts the ask up front, the habit of narrowing each email to one request, and real message mockups to compare.
PersonalSet the Introduction in Three Moves and the Report Follows
When a report is told it drifted off topic, the cause sits in the introduction, not the body. Which conversation you are inside, what is still missing in it, what this piece will do about that. Once those three moves are in the introduction, every body heading becomes one share of that promise.
StudyWrite the Introduction Last: How to Finish a Research Paper Draft
A paper is arranged in the order a reviewer reads it, not the order you discovered things. This guide covers the gap sentence, a reproducible methods section, keeping results apart from interpretation, and a drafting order that runs from methods to abstract.
WritingWhat Gets a Book Manuscript Finished Is Not Inspiration but Page Count
A long manuscript begins with inspiration and ends with page count. For anyone holding a first full-length draft: how to divide chapters and scenes, set a session quota and measure progress, build an outline and then shake it, separate rereading from rewriting, and judge a first draft differently from a revision.
WritingWhat a Personal Essay Has to Settle Before the Sentences
A draft that records what happened and stops at diary level is usually missing the thing you came to say. Five places, in order: separating situation from story, choosing material from what is still unsettled, putting the scene ahead of the reflection, deciding what to cut when other people appear, and stripping the moral out of the last paragraph.