14 simple ways to save time as an online writer

Mastery Den, Tuesday Edition, sunny Sofia morning, 5-min read.

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Many of you tell me you find it hard to find time to write.

You want to build a brand and make an impact, but you’re lacking the main component of either of these: consistency.

Fifteen years + of writing online and more than seven posts published per week have shown me how to be more efficient.

Here’s how:

Strengthen your commitment.

I hate to break it to you, but you really do have time to write.

It’s just that you aren’t all that committed to doing it.

Bolster your commitment in two ways.

1) Write a powerful list of reasons why you must write.

2) Write regardless of how you feel.

Write less.

I write so much each week because I don’t set out to write all that much when I sit down for a session.

I have a message, a rough outline and a mantra that says: ‘I am keeping this tiny.’

This leads to less overwhelm and an emphasis on simplicity.

If I write more, I write more, with barely any resistance.

Write fast.

This is something that comes with practice.

But you need to stop associating speed with poor writing.

It is often very much the opposite.

Create a system.

We all have the perfect system for the results we are getting.

If those results aren’t great, create a system that takes your emotions out of the equation and gets you to write consistently.

What does that system look like?

Write energised.

There are several ways to increase your energy at the starting block.

Don’t fill your body with insulin-spiking carbs beforehand, making you sluggish. Exercise to get the blood flowing to the brain.

And write with a sense of purpose that comes from knowing the bigger mission you are on.

Outline.

It’s much easier to walk ten miles when you know the five main milestones that plot your path.

You don’t want to end up in Farmer John’s cabbage patch.

Don’t outline.

Writing benefits from an outline, but often it doesn’t.

If you know what’s going to happen at the end of a movie, why watch it?

If you know all there is to know about your written piece, the process loses its appeal.

Write in order.

Many of us get the order wrong.

We start in self-critical hot shot editor mode.

Then we wonder why writing feels so sluggish and takes forever. You’re in the wrong phase.

You need to start in having fun brainstorming mode. I show you exactly how to do this in my course: Online Writing Alchemy.

Make friends.

Online connections are built through social media.

When you know more people, you can band together and support each other’s work.

This is a collaborative effort that accelerates the results of your writing so you aren’t serenaded by crickets every afternoon.

Write fun.

There’s no better way to ensure you suffer through slow writing when you can’t find a way to enjoy yourself.

Writing fun means enjoying yourself but also writing to fire you up.

They say writing should be entertaining, but what many miss is that it should be entertaining, first and foremost, to you.

Repurpose.

When you’ve been publishing for a while, you’ll begin to accumulate quite a collection.

This material isn’t dead and buried. You can revive, re-use and repurpose it for considerable extra mileage in your content.

For example, this helped me double my Medium following in the last year.

Use AI.

Don’t use AI to write your final words unless you want to bid farewell to your personality and your audience.

But by all means beat the crap out of AI for your research, planning and idea-generation support.

This will save you a ton of time.

Write more.

A funny thing happens when we commit to writing more each week, regardless of our schedules.

We decrease the inevitable resistance that accompanies sparse writing output.

Why? Because each piece equates to less perceived significance.

Batch similar tasks.

Time yourself to write in twenty-minute sprints.

More than that, batch your tasks so you don’t keep jumping from one use of the brain to another. Stick to writing for a full hour or two.

Write multiple articles in one go, rather than an article, video, meetings, etc.

Okay, I can think of many other ways to save time, but I’ll leave those to you in the comments if you think of anything.

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