Andrew C Halliburton

Quick test for any doc: Does someone grab it mid-task? Or promise to "review it later"? "Later" means never. Redesign it.

Every strategy doc needs a "Not This" list. Without boundaries, you have a to-do list. With them, you have an actual decision. What you're NOT doing is the strategy.

A 30-page SOP isn't thorough. It's deferred decision-making. If your doc needs a "refresher meeting," it's not a strategy. It's a storage unit.

The sign your doc is actually working: it's messy. Clean margins = nobody's using it. Beat-up and edited = it's in the workflow. Stop optimizing for completeness. Optimize for action.

If you can't fit it on one screen, you haven't made the hard choices yet. Try it: Take your most important strategy doc. Rebuild it in this format. 20 minutes.

The "Not This" list turns a to-do list into actual strategy. It's where you document what you're NOT doing - which is where most teams fall apart.

The one-screen strategy template that replaced all my bloated docs: Three sections. One screen. Here's how it works:

If your most important strategy doc doesn't fit on one screen, you're documenting options - not making decisions.

Counterintuitive sign a doc is working? It gets messy. People write in margins. Skip sections. Adapt on the fly. Pristine docs aren't being used. Beat-up docs are.

I spent years building the wrong kind of documents. PRDs that went from 5 pages to 26 to 113. SOPs that no one opened twice. Strategy decks that needed "refresher meetings." Here's what finally fixed it:

Made "build friendships" a quarterly goal. Felt ridiculous at the time. Changed everything. Relationships are infrastructure, not afterthought.

The question that changed my Q2: "Who in my network leaves me feeling BETTER after we talk?" I found 40+ names in my last 90 days. Only 4-5 passed that filter. That gap is the loneliness tax.