Justwrite.biz

OH, THE PAPERWORK!

These days, people I know who are in professional occupations often tell me that paperwork is the bane of their lives. It’s not just the form-filling, though that’s bad enough. It’s the sheer amount of communicating they have to do: writing reports and letters, negotiating with managers, keeping everyone with an interest in their current client, case or project informed and up to date, and responding to all the enquiries and requests that come flooding in. It’s all too easy to get behind. Papers stack up on your desk and in your in-tray, and you feel under more and more pressure. Work never stops at 5 or 5.30. Email has been a mixed blessing: it’s quicker than letter-writing, but emails come flooding in and the temptation is to dash a message off without giving it the care that you would give to a letter or report.

As a professional person yourself, you are – I’m sure – reasonably literate and familiar with the business of writing. You’re a graduate, I expect, so the written word is a familiar medium to you. You’re accustomed to reading books and journals, looking things up in reference books and on the web, and putting words on paper yourself. Do you remember writing essays, or reports on projects or lab work – and sitting exams?

So how might the justwrite service be able to help you? If you’re finding the pressure to write is getting onerous – it’s taking too much of your time, you can’t switch off from it, you just feel hard-pressed – I think I may be able to help.

The method I would suggest we use is a four-stage one:

1    Reviewing your present working methods
2    Analysing how you prioritize and how you use your time
3    Developing proposals for doing things differently
4    Trying out those proposals in practice.

1. Reviewing your present working methods. This amounts to simply observing and recording what you actually do in dealing with your paperwork, and when you actually do it. You may be able to do this for yourself, by keeping a detailed minute-by-minute diary, but many people find the diary-keeping a distraction and prefer to have someone else monitoring them on a typical day. They are frequently surprised by what the observer notices – which confirms, I think, that the spectator does indeed ‘see more of the game’.

2. Analysing how you prioritize and how you use your time. This involves seeing how you place writing tasks in sequence – how you decide to tackle one task before another – and, for example, whether you use deadlines in a helpful way, whether you frequently move from one uncompleted task to another, and whether you have a systematic drafting technique.

3. Developing proposals for doing things differently. All four stages are collaborative ones, but this one most of all. Proposals are worthless unless you are committed to doing your best to make them succeed. So we have to work together to build on the Stage 2 analysis. Proposals would probably cover prioritizing, your use of deadlines, and being more systematic in your working methods. They have to be very specific, so you know exactly what you are going to do.

4. Trying out those proposals in practice. This stage is very much down to you, but I won’t abandon you at this point. All proposals have to be tested in action, and almost certainly ours will require some refinement, some fine-tuning. If you keep me posted about how you’re getting on we can work on this fine-tuning together.

GET IN TOUCH!

If you’ve read this far, and looked at my Welcome page, you know something of who I am as well as how I work. If you’re interested, you should have some idea how I might be able to help you. If you would like more information on anything, including fees (reasonable!), please send me an email. Send it to:
peter.levin [at] justwrite.biz

As I said earlier, I’ll be happy to discuss your needs. If you include your phone number (landline preferred, please) in your email, I’ll be happy to give you a call and we can talk over the phone. There’s no charge for an exploratory discussion, of course. I look forward to hearing from you.

GUARANTEE OF CONFIDENTIALITY

I appreciate the need for complete confidentiality in the work I do for you. I treat everything that passes between me and my clients in complete confidence. I do not and will not disclose any information about clients, or any information that would enable a client to be identified.

Peter Levin

‘Helping you get from first thoughts to polished paragraphs’