🤔 I recently wrote about the importance of being conscious of your purpose when authoring a document. I spoke on the problem of trying to write to an audience when the intended audience isn’t defined. I concluded that it’s better to define your audience before beginning the draft work, because uncertainty multiplies your work.

🎯 During my work on my previous project, I slowed down for a while as I changed my mind about how much written explanation should be included. I determined ultimately my target audience. I wanted to finish my cleanup while completing the document in the appropriate manner, but by then I needed to move on to the next project in order to maintain a reasonable pace.

📝 I suspended work on that how-to document, and began a new one with a different target audience: future me. The outcome of restarting from scratch was one and a half documents, plus a cleaned dataset. I can finish work on the documents if time permits. The data that came out of it is what mattered most.

🧠 In that previous project, the best pace was achieved when the target audience was my future self, because I didn’t have to multiplex my mental attention with written explanations beyond section headings and sparse commentary. I was best able to maintain a flow of organized thoughts if I single mindedly focused on completing the underlying task of cleanup—only showing my work well enough to document how I‘d spent my time and energy, and to assure reproducible results.

🎯 So, for the next project, I’m taking the same approach that worked before. I’ll show my work by writing out all the steps as I go without attempting to explain anything explicitly. I’ll revise the document with another audience in mind if the need arises. This should get me to a big picture understanding of the overall data more quickly, so I can be more helpful to the success of the projects.