⌨️ Just Keep Typing
Writing a blog post takes time, but the actual writing part is pretty quick. The average person types 40 words per minute, which means a 1,000-word article should only take 25 minutes to type, right?
As it turns out, the actual writing is pretty straight forward and comes easy after a bit of practice building the habit—so why does the writing process seem so difficult, and why does it take so long?
Spoiler alert: we’re treating a three-phase process as one.
Get In The Zone (and Stay There)
You know that feeling when you’re on a roll, in the zone, and your typing can’t keep up with your mind because the ideas come so fast?
Psychologists call that your “flow state” and that cocktail of ideas, energy, and focus is when you do your best work—but if you get stuck on your first paragraph you’ll never reach flow state.
Once you reach that flow state, you need to just keep typing. Your flow state comes to a hard stop the minute you overthink your content or stop to edit your grammar or punctuation.
Jeff Goins broke this down in a masterclass on writing killer content, where he explains that the writing process is actually a collection of three distinct activities:
- Ideation
- Drafting
- Editing
We get stuck and the writing process becomes difficult when we try to mix those activities together, because they each require different mental models and leverage different parts of the brain.
The 3-Bucket Writing System
The model Jeff Goins laid out to break your writing process down into three distinct “buckets” of content, and only work on one at a time.
This process works well for any content, whether that’s a written article, podcast episode, or video. Ideation, drafting, and editing.
Please Try This At Home
You can use the 3-bucket system to create blocks of content creation time for each of these three different activities.
Use a tool like Asana to create a visual board layout of your content calendar (Trello has this functionality as well). Then begin!
