Q: What has DeepSeek got to do with business writing?

A: Constraints lead to innovation.

The scientists working for DeepSeek didn't have the money and data centres filled with £30,000 microchips so they had to find a different way to build artificial intelligence models. They did it by asking better questions of the data rather than cramming more and more data through their processors (as I understand it, anyway).

You can apply this approach to your writing.

The most obvious constraint is time. If you have 1 hour instead of 1 day to write a report, what would you do?

And if you allow yourself 1 or 2 pages instead of 20?

• You might ask yourself better questions about what to include and what to exclude.
• You might write shorter, snappier sentences.
• You might think about how to lay out your document to make it easier to read.

If you want to improve your writing, give yourself some constraints.