Improve Writing Productivity

How to Write Faster and More Consistently to Increase Your Income

Learning how to write efficiently plays into your productivity and income as well as impact how much free time you have.

With the new emphasis at Medium on reading times, the ability to write more efficiently will play heavily into the amount you are able to earn. That obviously doesn’t mean that you can write anything and as long as it is lengthy realize large earnings. You still have to write cleanly, on topics that people want to read about and do so in an engaging manner. Those things all have to come first. But if it takes you all day to write a 100 words, you aren’t likely to be able to make a living writing full time.

I have found that being able to write quickly and cleanly affects how I feel about my writing and has a large impact on my mood. I think for full time writers, even when we aren’t actively writing, we are thinking about it. We are either trying to work through a problem with something we’re working on, thinking of new topics to write about, considering where to submit our writing, or mentally developing an idea. Because of this, writing influences every part of our lives. So we never really turn it off completely, always leaving ourselves open even when we are taking time out to do something else.

For me, when my writing goes well early in the morning, that leads to an overall good day. My mood is up, I’m more likely to get out and do things with others, and I find that I genuinely want to write more that day. On days when writing feels like pulling teeth, I struggle, feel that I am having to force myself to put words on paper and can’t wait until I’m done with the article so I put the writing away for the day. For the rest of the day I am in the doldrums, doing things to distract myself from writing such as read or watch movies.

One thing that strongly contributes to how I feel about my writing is how smoothly the writing process goes. When I really have to struggle to complete a piece or to come up with enough information to include to make it a viable article in my mind, the writer seems harder and the result less interesting.

Some of that is to be expected. When you write to publish every day, you won’t love everything you create. But for me, I need to have at least some part of the week taken up with writing that seemed to come about naturally, was easy to write and which I was able to complete quickly.

In order to do this, I am always looking for ways to write more efficiently. And I find that like calls to like, such that when I have several good writing days when I am able to write efficiently and create what I think are interesting works in the morning hours, the more similar days I will have that week.

Managing Your Flow State

The one factor that I’ve found contributes the most to my ability to write efficiently, is my ability to manage my flow state. Flow state is generally referred to as the optimal state of consciousness that leads us to feel and perform our best, when we are completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The term can be tough to define for writers because it is more instinctual than rational, and is very subjective. I like to think of it as the sense we have when our writing seems musical rather than just about meaning. A lot of people refer to this as being in the “zone.”

Different writers have different ways of getting into the writing zone. Some have a special room they’ve created that help them get on task and stay there while others may look for different creative settings that inspire them. Some may have rituals they perform which put them in the right frame of mind or an order they do things in to prompt a routine.

Flow state can help you write effectively, by keying into the neurological underpinnings related to it. Researchers have found that the areas of the brain we use when writing vs. those we use when editing are completely different. So one thing that helps you remain in the flow state is to separate your writing and editing activities instead of editing as you go.

This makes sense for a few reasons. First, when you continuously stop to edit, it interrupts your momentum and what you are trying to express. This makes it feel like you are constantly stopping and starting, which can be not just disruptive to your writing process but exhausting as well. It also makes you look at your writing with a critical eye. So you are more likely not to feel good about what you are working on, seeing it as lacking in skill or creativity.

When you let yourself write, you enable yourself to freely express what it is that you want to say even if not in the best form initially. Creativity is the ability to put together existing ideas in novel ways to say something that hasn’t been said quite like that before. This ability needs freedom to happen. Once your ideas are down, then going back and editing them can hone them into a tightly crafted piece.

Use Writing Sprints to Help Get Yourself Into the Zone

For me, writing in sprints works best for getting me into a flow state. It lets me come up with creative new ways of thinking about things and the ability to get them down on paper. At the same time, expressing new ideas has a certain excitement to it and so it can also be tiring. Rather than wait until I have burned myself out, I write until I’m just beginning to feel a slowing down and then I take a break.

The ideal time period for these sprints are around 45 minutes. I may not have gotten down all the ideas I intend to include in the piece, but I will have a good idea where I’m going and it won’t be difficult to complete it when I return. I rarely need more than two sprints to finish the writing of an article which usually amount to about an hour to an hour and a half of writing.

Once I have the ideas down, I can go back and flesh them out, get rid of the redundancies, (one of my biggest writing problems), reorder points and sections and edit for clarity, accuracy and to correct mistakes. My editing process usually takes anywhere from a half hour to an hour and I usually do this in one sitting or two at the most.

This also helps when I go back to edit. When you edit as you go along and switch back and forth between writing and editing, you can’t do either task well. When you focus solely on editing it makes it possible for you to truly see what you are doing wrong over and over. This means the next time you sit down to write you won’t make these same mistakes, which will also speed up your writing. So you can be in flow state for the editing work as well. It’s all about focus.

Over time this system forms a circle, where you write as well as you can, analyze and edit that writing, learning what you do wrong on a regularly basis, perhaps read up on some craft books to learn how to do it better, and write something else only this piece will be a bit stronger for the process of the last piece. The more you do this, the better your first drafts will be and the less editing you’ll need after they’re complete.

So you’ll begin to write faster, have less need for editing and be able to publish more consistently. This will all lead to a better mood, more confidence in your writing ability and the days you feel like writing is a struggle and feels like drudgery will become fewer and farther between.

That being said, there are some people who need to edit as they write and are very skillful at switching between the two. If that works for you, then stick with it. But if you don’t do this very easily or feel like you lose your place or train of thought when you try to keep switching, try using sprints as a way to increase your productivity and writing efficiency. If you use this system for a week or so, you’ll likely find that it’s a more efficient way of writing, and if you do this consistently, you’ll finish a lot more articles, poems, novels or whatever it is you are writing and this is the key to becoming a successful professional writer.

Take Away

If you want to learn how to write more quickly and more consistently, try writing sprints for a week. Set a timer for whatever amount of time you are comfortable with, ideally the amount that will let you take a break before you get worn out. Come up with your topic and three key points you want to cover before hand. Then sit and write until the alarm goes off. Take a break and if you haven’t finished the article, do another sprint. Take another break and come back to edit it, ideally in a single sitting. All it takes is 7 to 10 days for you to see how much more efficient your writing can become.

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