I like the part about writing things down. There is a lot of mental organization that needs to happen when you write it down. It also forces you to make decisions.. which is also hard.
A related aspect of organization and making decisions is meetings.
Meetings, other than 1 on 1 meetings/collaborations, are best for making decisions, NOT for sharing information.
Information sharing relevant to the decisions to be made should happen before the meeting via group emails (or possibly through a software tool like Jira) with questions and responses. Written information is easier to reference, quicker to search through, and can be multiprocessed in that multiple people can share information or ask questions simultaneously. If additional information is needed after the fact, you can email after the meeting.
Going into a meeting about building a feature or product for example, you should know the constraints on that, and be able to weigh them in making the decision. When is it due? Who is available to work on it, who will test it, who will maintain it, and who is it for? What aspects/functions are necessary, and what are merely desirable? What resources are available? Why is the feature being added? How might it be constructed?
Finally, be ruthless about moving forward in meetings to get to decisions. If a couple of people agree on something, and begin to quibble over the details? Ask if anybody is opposed to that general idea or has a better one to offer. If not you have made that decision, and can decide on the details, but if so, the detail discussion is premature. It's quite probably also premature if you haven't decided who is going to work on it; the point is you want to nail down the higher level decisions, not get lost in the weeds.
Amazon just assumes that nobody will read the prep material and reserves a block of time at the beginning (as long as 90m IME) for silent reading and markup. Seemed to work pretty well.
At my current company (small startup) I wanted to convince people to talk through the issues and write things down or write down at least something. Think of user stories, requirements, personas, product vision, company vision, sprint goals.
In my opinion, writing things down helps to clarify your thinking and lets others understand how you think. It also reduces the risk of the devs implementing something that doesn't fix the users' issue.
They think writing things down is overhead, too much "process", too much time. What they (IMO) don't see is that discussing requirements, assumptions before developing a feature (or even prioritizing a feature) helps to establish a common understanding of the issue and the proposed solution.
Finding a way to show them might be difficult, but rewarding.
(unsolicited advice) What I've learned in working on that skill; avoid coming from a position of supremacy, and rely on actions/results to communicate most of the message. Also, a lot of acceptance and patience.
I like to write a lot of pseudo code before real code, gradually digging down into lower level implementation details, so as to not waste time worrying about syntax while making higher level decisions.
However, it's taken me a long time to develop what I have of that skill; to feel out the different layers decisions will be made, then write pseudocode with the intent of eeking out and resolving most of them.
Doing so, things end up feeling more like trade-offs than compromises.
The only time I write anything with a pen and paper now a days, for the most part, is when I do 1:1s and check ins with my team. No computers for me. If I need to schedule something it comes after. The team member gets my full attention, no phones, Slack, email, or anything getting in the way.
