If you don’t have time to write… do this
In March, I wrote 70k words in 7 days… while working my regular job.
In March, I wrote 70k words in 7 days… while working my regular job.
In this article, I’m gonna show you the exact writing workflow I used:
1. Find Good Ideas
Finding — not creating.
In general — and especially when you’re starting out — the goal isn’t to create ideas… but to find them.
Ideas that are uniquely yours are untested. You don’t know if they will genuinely serve the audience, or just entertain you.
If you want to build an audience, you start by finding good ideas.
Look at posts on social platforms, comments on content, active threads within communities, popular google searches — anywhere your target audience is.
Whatever ideas are getting high reach (views/searches) or high engagement (comments/interactions) resonate with the audience.
Jot that idea down, and a 3 bullet-point outline of what the content would be.
E.g.
- Idea: creating content you like doesn’t build the audience.
- Outline: There’s 3 types of content:
- Content that builds the audience
2. Content that serves the audience
3. Content that serves the super fans (this is usually the content you like).
In the 3 weeks leading up to the challenge, I found 108 ideas.
The more you practice looking for ideas, the easier it will be to find them.
Logging ideas into an idea bank is what keeps you from wasting time staring at a blank page.
If you’re a non-fiction writer who’s struggling to make money, you’re in the right place.
Building a business and being great at writing are two different skills.
I send out an (almost) daily short email with business and productivity tips for writers.
2. Generating The Article
I would pick an idea, open an audio recording app on my phone, and go for a walk.
On that walk, I would record myself explaining each of the bullet points from the outline.
When I got home, I would have AI transcribe the audio.
I was able to generate three-to-five 1,000 word articles per-hour this way.
That’s it.
It doesn’t need to be fancy.
If you focus on finding and logging good ideas… and then recording those ideas and using AI to transcribe them… your content creation workflow just got a whole-lot faster.
PS. For those who want to go deeper, I believe this process worked for 3 reasons:
- Idea finding and article generation require two different mental states. When I separating the time I do each of them, I get the most out of each mental state.
- If you have a bank of ideas to choose from, you’re never staring at a blank page. This was a huge time saver!
- Most people can speak 3x faster than they can write. When you speak your ideas, you don’t have the ability to go back and edit them. This creates a stream of consciousness where you can focus on getting the idea on paper rather than focusing on the formatting or editing grammar.
I still use this writing workflow today.
If you don’t have time to write, give this a try.
