Out of necessity, I think folks have developed some rough and ready techniques for speeding up the grant writing process. How many of these are evident in your shop?
1. Save time by waiting until the last minute to write the grant so that your are forced to go with your first draft and complete it in a minimal amount of time.
2. Save time by not writing the grant at all. This is when the agency decides as a group that the grant is not worth going after at all because of the risks involved, the lack of a perfect fit, and the high costs of administering a successful grant.
3. Assume that your Jedi mind powers have made it impossible for you to make a spelling or grammatical error.
4. Just copy, word for word, what someone else wrote the year before or on behalf of another agency.
5. Work really hard over a long period of time because - in comparison to the slackers - your efforts are actually extremely fast.
The truth is that we are all working in an extreme crisis atmosphere when we write grants and we need to use unusual techniques and planning to make things work. Ideally, my Lightning Fast Grant Writing Techniques workshops teach ideas that are more effective and more humane in the long-run.
