Writing well regularly is a hard thing to do — I’ve been going for six months now, and the more I get into the habit, the more I realise how much I’ve got left to learn.
There are some pointers that I’ve picked up from the experience though, so I thought I’d make an article about them.
The most effective way to publish good writing consistently is to make a habit of it. However, this habit only works if there are some other foundational habits underlying the process. These are the habits that I’m going to go over in this piece. From capturing ideas to batching your writing, these are going to make consistent quality output a breeze.
Let’s get started…
I. Write regularly
Obvious?
Perhaps, but it was several months before I started writing on more days than I didn’t write.
Whether this is full-blown content ready for publishing, note-taking, outlining or editing a piece, you should do something every day. It doesn’t always have to be publishing (as we’ll go into during the section about batching), but it pays to surround yourself with your writing and to get into the habit of progressing every single day.
The benefit of this is that you don’t lose the momentum that you build up. It’s easier to write on a regular basis than it is to bring yourself to publish a piece sporadically.
As well as this, writing regularly is better for improvement, even if the quality is lower. You learn better by writing more and improving on top of this content than you do by publishing infrequent pieces that you’ve done your best to make perfect from your limited past experience of publishing.
The person who publishes every day whether they feel like it or not beats the person who carefully crafts a piece every other week, so long as they look at the past performance of their work and make good on what wasn’t perfect in the past efforts.
Write regularly. Take notes regularly.
II. Write first thing in the morning
Writing takes unbroken attention, otherwise, you start to become disjointed, unstructured and unconfident in your pieces.
When’s the best time to write without distraction?
You guessed it.
First thing in the morning, before the day’s had a chance to put less important but seemingly more urgent things on your plate.
Don’t check notifications or email, keep your phone switched off and do some kind of writing, whether it’s taking notes, outlining or editing, like above, for 60–90 minutes. This is going to be better work than something similar that you try to reproduce during the day once life has intervened with its complexities and responsibilities.
It’s also good to get the writing off your chest first thing in the morning. As we’re trying to build a habit, it’s going to weigh on your mind during other tasks if you haven’t done your morning writing.
There are levels to this. Personally, I don’t eat anything before lunch, so I effectively ‘kill what I eat’ in modern terms. I have a glass of water and go straight to my laptop.
Get it done. Write first thing in the morning.
III. Read more
Reading, or consuming content, especially high-quality sources content is the catalyst for ideas.
You’ll get good at writing things people read if you read good things that people write (tongue twister lol).
Ideas aren’t created internally, merely generated from your own unique perspective on a combination of external ideas.
How do you access these external ideas? You read. This can be done in any media format, but books are the best. Authors have invested the most time and effort to bring you lots of powerful ideas in books, so they’re going to transfer to you creating the most powerful and engaging ideas for your own writing.
Bother less with cookie-cutter shallow content, like scrolling on social media platforms. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of concise, interesting content on there, but it’s outnumbered by the mindless rubbish, so you’ll get a higher return on investment by reading a book. Don’t cut out scrolling altogether, but limit your time spent doing it.
Pick up a book.
IV. Capture and manage ideas
The ideas we talked about in the above point?
They’re unpredictable. But they’re also your currency as a writer.
They could strike you at any given point in your life — people often find that ideas come when they’re doing mindless tasks that allow their mind to subconsciously mull things over, like walking the dog or working out.
This means you have to build a system to capture and manage these ideas so that they can be accessed and referred to usefully in the future when it’s time to create.
I use Todoist for capturing ideas, because it’s frictionless and powerful, accessible on my laptop or phone, anywhere I am.
The system I use keeps things simple, as yours should, but it’s flexible enough to be a vehicle for my work rather than a block to it.
To manage ideas and notes, I use a Zettelkasten in Obsidian. This contains a note-per-idea, linked web of thought structure that I can dip into when my inspiration is feeling low. After spending a year taking notes in this way, whilst trying out other offerings, this is the most effective method of personal knowledge management that I’ve found, without a doubt.
Capture your ideas and manage them.
V. Batching
A new habit within my arsenal of writing practices.
When writing on the internet, you have to be able to produce work very frequently, so that you appear on people’s timelines regularly.
If you do this on the day or in the moment, this takes up a lot more time than batching your similar tasks together at frequent intervals. If you spend a morning writing four pieces for the next four days, you’re going to save more time for generating ideas, writing outlines or building other parts of your writing empire than if you write one piece every morning.
The same is true with tweets, outlines or ideas. The quality also improves with batching, as your brain’s more focused on a single task, rather than smearing its attention residue over many different tasks.
I mentioned having a writing habit that you engage in daily. This isn’t to say that you write an article a day. Perhaps one day you write the tweets for the week, another day you write articles for the next few days, and the next day you write the next few issues of your newsletter.
If you can organise this, it’s much more effective than organising to do things on the day.
Batch your tasks to save time and improve the quality of the work.
These are the five tasks with the highest return on investment that I’ve experienced since I started publishing online. I’d recommend them to any writer, new or experienced. I hope you’ve learned something new from this piece, and as always, thanks for reading!