My “Quick” Methods of Writing That Saves Me Hours Daily

Writing has been quite a thing lately.

People now have freedom to share their thoughts and stories through multiple mediums. Writing blogs have now become a lot of people’s side-hustles.

To me, writing had never been my passion until I tried it. It’s been a roller-coaster ride since then. I would sometimes enjoy writing very much but there are days where I would do the opposite just because I don’t feel like doing it.

The reason being it takes quite a bit of time to make a great piece of writing. Editing the draft to get rid of typos is inevitable and it could be very time-consuming. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way forever.

Everything started to become easier once I utilised these “quick” methods I invented myself.

No, it doesn’t mean that you would spend 20 minutes to write a thousand-views article after applying this approach.

The definition of “quick” in my vocabulary is to write a high-quality blog in the most efficient way possible.

The point is that I am now capable of getting started to write with less hesitation after adopting this way of writing. Writing doesn’t require as much as willpower as it did before.

I can now hit the publish button quicker without compromising the great quality I want my blogs to have.

I am glad I came up with this discovery and I am here to share it with you!

Collecting Ideas

To get started, you will need to come up with some ideas on what to write. Ideas may arise from multiple sources.

It could come from your curiosity mind during your full-time-job shift or it could pass by after you see something interesting on the internet and you thought it could be a great topic to write about.

Everyone has their own ways to be creative in this aspect. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as the idea comes around.

To me, I collect ideas from other people’s writings. I would go on Medium and read a bunch of great articles from other creative authors. Doing so gives me ideas on similar topics that I could write next for my blog without copying other people’s content.

This at the same time helps me to learn from other people’s masterpiece and get better at writing. That’s a win-win strategy!

Another weird thing that I do is to sit alone in my room and utilise my desire to learn to get those ideas.

Let’s say I am wondering about how nice it is to have a girlfriend since I’ve never been in relationship with anyone in my entire life. Since I am 20, the title for my next blog would then be, “How It Feels Like to Be Single For 20 Years”.

That’s a good one.

I would list all of the ideas I’ve come up with on my phone and I would go back to it anytime I want to write.

This saves me hours of my time by being able to start writing right away, anywhere and anytime, without being confused not knowing what to write.

Research

Once I choose a topic to elaborate on, I would get into my research phase. During this period, I like to make sure that there is as minimum as distraction around myself.

My research consists of:

1. Creating a list of unique things that come off the top of my head that many people wouldn’t know about. This could be based on your life experience that you think is unique and hasn’t been told before.
2. Going on internet to get additional useful information that could be included in my writing. This is very important for me since I may not be familiar with some topics I am writing about. So I’d like to make sure I get enough information from relevant and trustworthy resources.
3. Talking about it out loud to myself for at least 10 minutes. This process helps me to get the hang of a particular topic I am writing. I’d like to pretend I am explaining about this thing to my best friend. Once I found out about this, my writing process has become so much easier since I now know the things I am going to write.

This step is straight-forward. You need to write about what you know and what people from dependable sources have to say about a certain topic. This connection between your ideas and other’s will complement each other and create a sense of credibility in your blog.

First Draft

The reason why a lot of people are stressed in the process of writing their blog is because they try so hard to write their first draft as flawlessly as they possibly can.

I am not blaming them for this because I also do that all the time. Nowadays, human are hard-wired to have perfectionism in this internet world.

One day, I realised that I had been afraid of making mistakes in my first draft because I didn’t want to go back to redo things again. I found out that this was the most time-consuming thing that I had always been doing.

Doesn’t matter how good of a writer we are, we will make mistakes and we need to double-check our writing anyway. Error is inevitable.

Then, wouldn’t it be easier to just lay down all of our ideas on paper without worrying about it as much?

Take it easy and don’t stress because we can always go back at it and reconnect the thread if something doesn’t sound right.

Having this mindset allows me to write more effortlessly without being afraid of making mistakes on my first draft. This has saved me from wasting my time and incurring unnecessary mental burden.

Edit and Publish!

Now is the time for you to worry about correcting your mistakes during the process of writing.

Things to do before publishing:

1. Fixing all grammatical errors, typos and punctuations errors.
2. Reading article again to make sure content flows nicely. Make sure all the things you’ve said are connecting to each other. Add words to describe more clearly and subtract words if it has little to no value in your writing.
3. Lastly, going through it again, top-to-bottom to see if there is anything you can do to make your blog look as good as possible. My writing usually revolves around using a lot of gaps in between paragraphs and utilising all kind of features provided by Medium.

Editing could make a huge difference to the end result.

Your blog would look 100% better when you are creatively spicing things up with different type of fonts and features, like bold and italic to convey emotions and meanings in writing.

Also, nobody likes to read a crazy long paragraph. So, you may benefit by frequently adding gaps in your blog to make it easier for people to read your blogs!

After all being said, it is crucial for you to keep in mind that you can’t sacrifice getting faster in writing your blog with losing the quality of it. People can easily notice whether a piece of writing is made with careful consideration or not.

So, doing these steps in order has always been my go-to when it comes to writing blogs as efficient and organised as possible, without wasting the most valuable asset that we have, which is time.

After everything is done, nothing else you could do but to press the publish button!