During my daily writing journey, many have either asked me how do I manage to write something everyday or they have just shook their heads in disbelief like if would be an unattainable feat.
To be honest, it looked like that to me as well a few months ago.
The truth is that I don’t write everyday. I chunk the type of work I do in batches and here is what I go about it:
they just shook their heads in disbelief like if it would be an unattainable feat
There are three fundamental areas that I have separated this effort, and each of them uses a particular set of skills:
1.- IDEATION
This is the process through I come up with new topics to write about. It is definitely a more creative and “big thinking” process. Some of you may call it “Inspiration”. I just call it a damn good system for remembering ideas. It is not easy to remember all the things that we think about in one day, so when something good hits me, I have created the discipline of writing it down. I do this through either WordPress’ mobile app, by creating a new draft post, or I just send an email to myself, from where I can later create a post.
This can be as simple as a title, a phrase, or sometimes a bit longer explanation of what I am intending to say.
Not everyday are the same, sometimes I can have three or four ideas in a few minutes, sometimes they come harder. When this happens, I resort to trying to focus the mind around the topics I have long selected (have I told you that PPILL stands for Purpose, Process, Innovation, Leverage, and Leadership?). This usually helps quite a bit. All these ideas end up in my WordPress blog, classified under a particular category that I can later pull up, which brings me to the next section.
2.- FLESHING OUT
In this phase, I use the skills and mindset that we usually associate with a writer, the person who sits in front of a keyboard and intentionally writes. I regularly sit down, and go through the topics I have saved through the ideation process, and I flesh them out. I write out the details of what I am trying to say, look for quotes if necessary, etc. Sometimes I start with a structure in mind, sometimes it develops naturally.
There is a lot of editing going on in this phase, moving paragraphs around so that they make more sense.
Once a post has gone through these process, they are flagged in a different way, so I can come back to them in the next phase.
3.- EDITING/PUBLISHING
I normally do this only once a week. It is quite some work, but I have experience that I can move through this quite fast. Here, I put on my marketing and critical hats. Each post created in the previous phase gets cleaned, checked for grammar errors and typos, formatted, and then the “metadata” gets fixed as well. Most posts get a new title, they are re-classified in a different category, they are given an introductory paragraph, hashtags and an image. Finally the post gets scheduled to go public sometime in the future.
This process -together with a quite robust system for publishing- has helped me not only to be consistent in my writing and to produce more content than I have ever imagined I would, but also to spend less time in the process.