Publishing

After you have edited your first draft into your final draft, and carefully proofread your work until it is free of errors, it is now time to publish what you wrote.

Technically, publishing is only the process of making a document available to your target audience. Practically, however, the publishing process should also include letting your audience know there is something they should read.

For example, you have technically published a document if you make it available for download on the company intranet, but if no one knows your document exists, no one will know to read it. In this case, the publishing process should include both making it available on the intranet, and sending people the link to the document, which might be done over text, chat, or email.

In the business world, there is a preference for notifying people of completed documents via email, as email is the typical way businesses audit that something happened. Practically speaking, this means that if someone said they were not notified that a document was published, but a notice of its publication was sent to their company email address, the fact is that they were notified, as it is up to them to keep on top of their email.

Further, as documents will often have revisions made to them after they were initially published, it is often advisable to attach the document to the email instead of sending a link to it, as this captures what was sent, to whom it was sent, and when it was sent. If only a link to the document is included, there is no guarantee that the version of the document that is currently available is the same version that was available at the time the original email was sent.

Even if there is no link or attachment, emails themselves can serve the purpose of a published document, if for no other reason than in most cases, the contents of a document can be copy-and-pasted into the body of an email - formatting differences notwithstanding.

For example, let's say you had to notify your team of a difficult situation, and you decided to compose an email outlining the situation, what caused it, who was affected, and how the company was going to address it. You might draft the email as a separate document, and then copy-and-paste the contents of the document into the body of the email before sending it. In this case the email itself served as the document being published.

If we think of an email like a document that we publish when we hit "send," one of the most important single pieces of advice in all of professional written communication is drawn into sharp focus: Under no circumstances should you ever send an email when you are frustrated, angry, or upset.

If a situation is dire enough, then have a conversation with someone in person or on the phone, but when we are upset, emails that we write can be defensive, accusatory, disrespectful, and unprofessional - none of which paints us in a positive light - and once we send the email, that email is out there sitting in people's inboxes forever. Even if you were to work with your email system administrator to retract the email, people will most likely have already seen it, and you cannot make them un-read what they read.

If you ever find yourself frustrated, angry, or upset, and you realize you are furiously typing away, ready to give people a piece of your mind, just walk away from your device, get a good night's sleep, and reconsider how you want to address the situation in the morning. A single email can easily ruin your reputation and career opportunities at a company and can even get someone fired. With emails: when you are in doubt as to if you should send it, don't send it, walk away, get some sleep, and reconsider your approach when you are calm and thinking clearly.

More generally, this scenario underscores how important it is to be sensitive to the timing of when something is published. In other words, just because you can publish something right now, it doesn't mean that right now is a good time to publish it.

The main reason why people will be ready to publish a document, but delay publishing it, is to increase the odds that someone will read it by sending it at the best time to be noticed.

For example, usually 9 am on a Monday morning and 5 pm on a Friday evening are both poor times to let people know there is a document for them to read, as on Monday people tend to have a lot of unread email from Friday and the weekend that they have to catch up on, and as they are clearing out their inbox they might miss your email notifying them that your document is ready to read. On Friday at 5 pm, people want to start their weekend, and are generally not going to stop and read your document as they are leaving work.

This general approach of timing when an email is sent is called, "Send Time Optimization," and is an important consideration whenever you are sending an email that you want people to read. While this concept is most often used in the field of email marketing, it is a very useful frame of mind to adopt anytime you want to maximize the chances that someone will read something you send them. The key is to ask yourself the question, "Is now the best time to send this, or should I wait for a better time?"

Where delaying publishing to an optimal time can become a challenge is when we want to publish our document before a deadline.

For example, if we had an end-of-week deadline, and we are done right at 5 pm on a Friday, it can be very tempting to publish our document immediately to meet our Friday deadline. However, if there is a better time to publish the document, you might contact the person who gave you the deadline, send them the completed document to prove that you are actually done, and ask for permission to delay publishing to a larger group when there is a higher chance that people will notice the email and read the document.

After all of the hard work of editing a first draft to a final draft, and the tedious task of proofreading are complete, the last thing you want is to have your work lost in someone's inbox because you rushed to publish before the optimal time. By giving thought as to how and when you publish a document, you increase the chances that the information it contains is effectively communicated throughout your organization, as well as help to ensure that your hard work receives the attention it deserves.