Begin workplace documents where the reader's interest ignites--not when you began to think about it.

Nothing gets said more often by a frustrated person who needs to write a workplace document than “I don’t know where to begin!”

References will be made about fear of the blank page or maybe he or she will claim to have writer’s block.

Whatever the real cause or excuse for not knowing how to start a document, there is a way to think about beginning a document by remembering tiresome ways not to begin a document:

Start where the content of your information needs to be released not with a report of when you started thinking about how to organize it or your thought processes behind the document. Speakers and preachers often do this and throw away their best opportunity to connect with a listener by explaining why you have been thinking about a subject and how you plan to speak about it. When a speaker does that or a writer explains how he or she is going to express something and why you create a very big yawn in your reader that he or she struggles to stifle from then on out.  Keep the explanation of why you are going to write and how you came to write it to yourself.   Find the real beginning.

To find the beginning try writing that information down and then watch yourself shift to the content that you need to provide. It will show up on the page but perhaps not until page three or so.  Then, delete the very long preamble or explanation and start at the real beginning, where the content that needs to be shared or released takes hold.

Learning to recognize where that beginning exists in your writing process will solve that mystery of where to begin for many other documents that you will need to produce for we each have an organizing pattern that is a part of our own process, and the more you write the more familiar you will become with your pattern of organization.

Start writing, and write towards the truthful beginning.  That beginning is where you think the reader will find his or her starting point of interest--not a report of when and how you began to think about writing the document.

Daphne's latest book is Christmas in Fountain City