2024-09-26

You're pounding away at the keyboard, words coming freely, the next sentence building effortlessly on the last. And then it hits: what comes next? The right adjective, uncertainty on how to tie two paragraphs together, a forgotten fact or figure. You could sit and ponder the question, lose all momentum, your train of thought, the deadline inching closer, or you could use an approach I stumbled on from journalism that has become a core tenet of how I write, code, everything.

When you're not sure what to say, TK it.

'TK' or even just 'tk' if you're really in a hurry, is a method borrowed from journalism meaning 'to come' (A word on why it's not 'tc' in a second). It's as simple as that. Rather than just waiting for the right word to appear or stopping to write a note on what to come back to, just put down a TK and keep going.

It's well established that it's easier to keep writing if you've already started -TK helps preserve that momentum. Rather than stopping and starting, dropping in a TK just becomes a natural part of the sentence; letting you get the full picture down before you come back to fill in the finer details. It's this approach that lets me appear as if I always know what word should come next. Instead of sporadic bursts of typing followed by periods of contemplation, I can just keep getting words down without missing a beat. Any uncertainty? TK it.

TK also has other benefits - it doubles as built-in TODO checklist available in any text editor. Rather than keeping what parts need revisited in a separate file or application, I can get a draft of a paper ready, hit CTRL+F and with just two characters reliably see everything that still needs done.

The obvious question that comes from this is why not just type TODO, add a few question marks, or highlight the text that needs to be looked at? TK is great because it's a series of letters that don't naturally appears in any word (As far as I can think of). This is also why it's 'TK' and not 'TC'. The letters 'tc' appear everywhere - waTCh, scraTCh, caTCh. In fact the online dictionary suggests there are over 7000 words that contain 'tc' - not great for avoiding false positives. TODO as well appears more than you think. For example you might be discussing your new favourite social network MasTODOn or for our friends in the field of Zoology - there's glypTODOnt, DiproTODOntia, and NoTODOntidae. Only a small nuisance if you get some false positives but a nuisance nonetheless. TK removes that so that any match is definitely a match; you always have a clear idea of what needs looked at.

This practice of mine has raised enough eyebrows that I thought I'd actually bring attention to it more widely. Particularly in academia where daily writing is almost a fact of life, I was surprised that the practice wasn't more well known. Of course the only problem with writing a post about this approach is that it becomes hard to tell what's an example and what's a placeholder. TK.