How To Write When We Are Squeezed For Time
Because that is reality.
This is a recurring thought in my mind. That is because time is not always on my side, especially when my business, projects and investment trading demand more attention than I would like. And I think that is the situation that we are all dealing with.
We have to understand that writing itself requires more time than actual typing. We need to think about ideas, write, and then prune the prose for clarity.
So, how can we short-cut this process?
Essentially, how can we still write and publish our work when we have only 30 minutes, 45 minutes of uninterrupted time during our day?
There are 3 suggestions from my end.
One — Repurpose Previous Published Content Across Publications.
First, go through the folder that houses our brilliant workpieces. Pick those stories that have been published into Publication A months back. Then, rewrite it to suit Publication B.
Chances are, we will have new insights when we read our work that is written a long time back. When we rewrite, we add new perspectives to our previous work. It effectively polishes them for a better presentation of ideas.
Also, publications we write for tend to have overlaps in terms of genres. Publication A focusing on motivation, and Publication B focusing on life lessons have a lot in common. Plus, it is easier to rewrite existing content.
Food for thought.
Two — We Can Scale Up or Scale Down.
If we have been writing for a long time — We will notice something that we have a decent number of 3-minute, 4-minute, 5-minute, and even 10-minute read.
We can scale up our existing stories by reviewing the selected 3-minute articles and expand on them. A 500-word write-up is likely a summary of our ideas, so it would be easy to pile in the meat through elaborate.
We can summarise our 10-minute story too because it is likely to be too long in the first place.
Three — Short-Forms.
I recommend short-forms when we are extremely short of time. By that, I mean even a 15-minute coffee break is a luxury. That is possible.
When writing short forms, 3 concise paragraphs is what we need to lift our older stories and give our older stories a breath of new life.
We can reuse those copyright images that are already attached to those older stories.
No one says we cannot reuse the visual images we already have. In fact, I do think that searching for the right visuals takes up a lot of time in the writing process. Considering using the visual images you already have.
It saves us a lot of time.
My Take.
Life hijacks. When that happens, time can be our enemy. If we want longevity in our writing endeavors, we need to have methods to ensure that we write daily, no matter how short those stories may be.
And we need to relook at the entire writing process. I identify 3 blocks in the writing value chain: -
- Ideation.
- Actual writing.
- Post-production, such as searching for images and editing.
Each of these processes takes up considerable time. Our goal is to figure which one we spend the most time on and which of those we can cut-short to reduce the time-to-publish.
When we figure ourselves out, we will find techniques that allow us to write daily, regardless of disposable time.
Aldric
About the Author:
As a content contributor, I write my observations from daily life and my business exposure.
Because our life experience is the bedrock of our unique perspectives.
