Take the time to think
There is quite a lot of content on how to improve your communication skills – improving your posture, slowing down, articulating better, etc. All of these pieces of advice are mostly about the form and while they help, you first need the base – you need to have well structured thoughts about your topic.
You can’t communicate well about how your system works if you don’t know how it works – at best you may convince them that you know it.
The only way to get more structured and clear thoughts about a topic is to learn more about it, take more points of view in consideration and just think more about it. It takes time and I don’t think there are a lot of shortcuts here. From there, here are two things that works for me (that you may find useful):
- You can think about things at any time during the day – during work hours but also during commute, during your run or any down time. Do it when it’s convenient for you and when you feel like it – don’t overwork yourself.
- It’s OK to step back and take time to think – even during live meetings. Every now and then I’ll tell people that I need time to read more about a topic and think more about it – e.g. when we are considering the (human) risk of doing
as it’s not something easily quantifiable. I personally learned that from a principal engineer at Google – they told me that their brain processes things better by reading than hearing things and somehow I found that it works better for me too.
The same goes for emails, pings etc. – unless there’s time pressure, it’s OK to circle back to these notifications once you have structured your thoughts.