Pick a format where polish isn’t necessary
You can’t make a feature film in a day, it’ll just be terrible every time. Same thing with a long-form article.
But you can probably do a thread, an email, a short video, and even a podcast episode.
If your cadence goal is daily, you can’t do something that requires a lot of prep, a lot of drafting, and a lot of private feedback for revision. The intention is to post it publicly and get public feedback.
That feedback helps you improve tomorrow’s piece, not today’s.
Daily makes things forgiving. Because the following day you can do some housekeeping if a reader pointed out an error.
Set a timer
Work will fill the time you give it. You know that already.
But do you take action on that?
Setting a timer is a reminder of that law. You’ll learn what to do with that time.
You can also start with some output like word count but still set a timer. Then you can compress the time little by little and see if the quality drops.
250 words in an hour
250 words in 45 minutes
250 words in 30 minutes
250 words in 15 minutes
250 words in 5 minutes
250 words in 1 minute
You’ll find a sweet spot somewhere in there.
Practice some structure
Not 10,000 kicks 1 time.
And no, not 1 kick 10,000 times
More like 5 kicks 2,000 times
John Danaher is one of the top BJJ coaches in the world. He teaches his students to master 6 submissions. 6 submissions with 98% confidence you’ll finish someone is better than 30 submissions with 20% confidence.
You won’t get that many chances for the percentages to stack well.
Oh yeah, writing.
Have some go-to…
- Openings
- Transitions
- Body formats
- Bullet formats
- Closers
Practice those over and over.
More writing, more revision
I always get tempted to dictate or transcribe audio and create an enormous wall of text. You really can get to 250 words in 1 minute.
1000 words in 10 minutes is not really a problem when you’re just talking.
The problem is trying to revise 5000 words of garbage in the 10 minutes I have left for the hour I blocked off.