You can apply the 80/20 to most things. I certainly apply it to my writing.
Without doubt, I spend about 80% of the time I allocate to a project on planning and preparation. Only around 20% of the time is actually spent on writing.
This planning and preparation stage is undoubtedly the hardest work. Once I’ve got the outline in good shape, actually writing the piece is fairly straightforward.
It’s hard work because it’s when I do all the thinking. What will my target audience want to know? What is their current point of view? Why will they want to read this piece and what will they want to see? Of all the information I’ve gathered, which bits are relevant? What’s the best structure? What points do I need to make and in what order? Which statistics are most compelling? What else do I need to back up a point I want to make? What detail is missing? Does my argument build logically or have I got things in the wrong order? Am I including information that isn’t relevant? Am I spending too long on one point and not enough on another?
This planning and preparation requires a great deal of critical thinking (and, often, being critical). It’s often inefficient – I’ll spend a couple of hours going down a rabbit hole only to realise it is completely irrelevant. But it’s a vital process that helps me deliver a piece that’s genuinely valuable not just words to fill up a page.
I realised the other day that it’s this critical thinking stage that AI-written pieces lack. AI isn’t (yet) capable of doing the intensely human – and intensely hard – work of planning and preparing a piece.
Its output sounds impressive but on closer inspection you realise it’s repeated some points just in a different way. It’s given equal weight to points that aren’t equal. It’s verbose.
As Rory Sutherland said recently, one of the marvels of AI is its ability to produce words effortlessly and near-instantly.
Yet it’s the time and effort it takes for a human to create copy that is so valuable. It’s the process of asking what makes you different, what your most compelling proposition is, who your target audience is and so on that helps you create the work that makes you stand out.
There are certainly things we want to accelerate and make more efficient. There are also things that are valuable precisely because they are so inefficient. Copywriting is one of those things. It is, in short, the act of thinking.
