Don't sweat the small stuff (until it's time to)
One thing guaranteed to slow you down when doing the first draft of a document is tinkering: fixing your spelling, rephrasing sentences, or stressing over finding the perfect word.
There is a time to polish your writing, but it's not when you're on draft 1.
Get the ideas down
Imagine yourself talking to the person who will read your document. Jot down...
Note down...
Bash out...
Dictate...
Scribble down...
Smash out...
...what you'd say to them. No perfection needed. Capture the ideas, the points, the essence, the flow of the message.
Then tinker
Once you've got a complete draft to work with, you can perfect it.
Why this speeds you up
It helps to see your whole draft before you edit. You have a bird's eye view of your content and you can delete repetition or move chunks around without feeling too attached to any particular part.
It puts wind in your sails. You feel you've accomplished a lot (you have!) and you're 'almost there'. Quickly writing a full first draft gives you momentum for the polishing stage.
Example of polishing a sentence
Here's a magnificent example of what can happen at the polishing stage.
First-draft sentence
Advocate to the governing body to stop out of sequence developments and urban sprawl where the infrastructure pre-requisites identified in the Future Development Strategy are not provided.
Polished sentence
Ask the Governing Body to stop urban developments in areas without the facilities and services to support them.
From Auckland Council's Annual Plan, this sentence was rewritten by Kate Sumner, one of their content advisors.
It won the Best Plain Language Sentence Transformation at last year's plain language awards.
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