How to Plan your Medium Articles Efficiently

Save your Time by Planning your Articles

As a writer, it can sometimes be hard to find ideas. It can also be hard to find time to write. Planning your articles may be a solution to these two issues.

In addition, Medium doesn’t implement a feature to have an overview of your planned articles. If you’re like me and like to do things in advance, you can end up without knowing when such and such article is scheduled.

If you wish to be consistent in your writing, it’s a big problem because sometimes you won’t remember you already have articles scheduled, and you will end up publishing many articles one day, and none the other.

I’ll show you how I plan my articles.

Finding Ideas

The first thing to planning articles is finding the ideas. Before thinking about how you want to plan, you have to think about what you want to plan.

To find ideas, the first thing to do is to write down everything coming through your mind at the time it comes to your mind. So it’s important to have a tool to capture ideas anywhere, anytime.

When I have my computer with me, I use Obsidian, a note-taking app. When I’m on any other device, I use a classic note-taking app. I could also use Obsidian on these devices, but I’m not paying for Obsidian Sync yet so it makes things difficult.

You can also find ideas using what you’ve already talked about. For example, I like to make series of articles. When I write a series of articles, I don’t initially have the entire article schedule in mind. This gives me some flexibility to focus the series on what I want as I go along so that I’m constantly coming up with new ideas.

This may seem contradictory to the idea of planning your articles, but I don’t think so, they are just different ways of working.

Finally, to get ideas, it is important to always consume content and discover new things. For my part, I read a lot, and I also consult a lot of blogs on the internet when I want to know something. From this content, I take notes, and this gives me material from which I can create articles.

Reviewing/Organizing Ideas

Once you’ve captured some ideas, it’s important to review and organize them.

First, the review step. It’s important to clear your inbox the more often as possible else ideas will accumulate. And it’s getting worse when they’re accumulating because there are a lot of useless ideas avoiding you to have a clear overview of those that are useful.

So, don’t just capture, but also review periodically your ideas.

Once you’ve kept all the useful ideas, it’s important to organize them to don’t get lost and plan your writing effectively. You can group them by theme for example.

This way, you can tell: “Okay, this day I’m going to write about programming”, and you know you can find all your programming ideas in the same place.

Maybe you don’t care about writing in a disordered way, but you should know the brain is more efficient when it keeps working on the same thing for several hours in a row.

Let’s say you have 6 hours available today, for example, it’s better to write 3 hours in a row than write for 1 hour, then play video games for 1 hour, then write for 1 hour, etc…

And in these 3 hours of writing you write about the same theme, let’s say programming, you’ll be even more efficient and focused.

Implementing the Planning

The last step is to implement your planning. You have many ways to do that, I’ll explain how I do it to give you ideas.

First, you have to understand what a Medium article planning “instance” is composed of. I consider it composed of a task and a publication date.

The task defines the date and time when you want to write. The publication date defines when the article will be published, obviously. It’s important to keep track of this information because it allows you to schedule your articles efficiently on Medium.

For example, if you want to publish 1 article a day, it can be good to have an overview of the articles you’ve already scheduled to know the publication date of the next article.

I use Obsidian to track tasks and events. But you can use other things. For example, I think a lot of people use a task manager like Todoist or TickTick, and a Calendar like Google Agenda. So, when planning, you would have a task in Todoist and an event in Google Agenda for each article you plan to write.

Below is an example of my calendar in Obsidian:

As you can see, it allows me to have a quick overview of all my scheduled articles.

And about the tasks, here is how it looks:

When I want to schedule a new article, I just have to open my calendar, find a day when no article is scheduled, and add an event for this article to my calendar. Then, I can add a task to know when I have to write. I can also add try to group tasks (usually, all my writing tasks are scheduled for the weekend).

Final Note

Planning helps to succeed in a lot of things. Writing on Medium included. And it’s not so hard to do.

I hope I’ve given you some ideas. If you know other ways to plan your articles, feel free to tell me in the comments, I’m curious!

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