My best friend gave me some valuable advice about writing. Although it was provided in the context of academic publishing, it could really apply to any aspect of life. As this is blog is rated PG, I will paraphrase and say that she advocates for a ‘Sad’ First Draft (SFD).
The SFD is far from perfect. The idea is to get thoughts onto a page in whatever form they can be extracted from the mind. There is no self-editing or polishing. The only objective is to transfer what is up here [gestures at head] down here [gestures at computer screen].
I’ve written about perfectionsim and how it can be paralyzing. Although it is uncomfortable for me, I’m learning to embrace the SFD philosophy in all of the spaces I inhabit.
Having just finished the SFD of the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation, I can say that I’m not perfect at being not perfect, but I am making progress.
Published by liz
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
View all posts by liz
Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
On an unrelated topic, I wish you and yours safety and good health as these big storms veer ever more in your direction!
LikeLike
Valuable advice (though you got me thinking what the original form of “SFD” was; I’m sure this question is going to bounce around in my head the whole day). I always had this tendency to “do it right the first time” all my life, culminating in slower-than-ideal progress due to perfectionism. A Partner at my previous firm advised me to dump all the thoughts onto the document first and refine later (that was in relation to functional analysis write-ups). It has been really difficult to change this mindset as, (1) it has been my way of writing my whole life (think writing on exam papers), and (2) I apply the “do it right the first time” method to pretty much every other aspects of my life so I keep having to make an exception when writing. But I see the benefit of doing download-first-refine-later when writing and am getting there (SLOWLY).
LikeLike