Here’s a problem with sharing documents you create: it’s scary. You risk failure. People may not like it. Clicking “send” is surprisingly hard. And of course, you’re likely to find a typo about 2 minutes after you share it. C’est la vie!
There’s a little psychological trick that I do to solve this: framing almost-every document I create as a “draft” or “notes,” and then, only over time, does it naturally evolve simply into the final version.
Look at it like this. Imagine an employee of yours or a freelancer you hire comes to you and says, “Here’s a doc I put together about important issue ABC.” You open it to read it, and you find one thought that makes no sense, you find a few typos, it’s missing a big point, you lose a little bit of respect for the poor guy who put it together.
But now, imagine the same guy gave you the same document but he said, “This is a very early draft, I just wanted to get my thoughts down on paper.” Now, suddenly, the typos are forgiven, and while you’re editing the Google Doc, you’ll naturally probably fix them. He missed a big point, but you’ll just want to improve it so you’ll leave a comment and add in your thoughts. And for the points that made no sense, oh, it’s just a first draft, so he’ll probably fix those later on.
The same document, with the same audience, but framed a bit differently gets a very different result.
There are two reasons why this strategy works magically.
The first is that a word like “draft” lowers the expectations drastically. And as a rule of thumb, it’s good to have lower expectations that are surpassed than high expectations that aren’t lived up to.
The second reason is, it allows you to get feedback on a document earlier rather than later, making the final version seem more final, and stronger.
Now, each situation is different. For bigger clients, formality is more important, but you can still apply the same principles here as well. For example, maybe before showing it to The Big Boss, you show earlier drafts to other people on the client’s team you are closer to?
