@futurebird this is not cuneiform at that point, but i know that for ancient romans, wax tablets were kinda the original post-it-note - scrap paper before scrap paper lol - so i wonder if wax you could get writing at a pretty good clip with, and then for a clay tablet (or especially a stone engraving...) you write it out more properly. i seem to remember some evidence that the babylonians did the same...?
we gotta get some people learning to write cuneiform so we can make them do Mavis Beacon Teaches Writing In Clay And-Or Wax and gather data for average performance. and as you can probably tell, that rapidly became less and less of a joke as i wrote that sentence