Six Ways I Built A Writing Habit — Having Failed Multiple Times Before
A couple of months ago I was made redundant.
The job market at this time of year is seriously slow going so, instead, I took the opportunity to take my side hustle up a notch and increase the amount of my creative output.
During that time, I’ve tried to write an article on Medium five times a week, which has meant I’ve had to build a successful writing habit.
While writing consistently for two months doesn’t make me an expert on the topic, I feel that it’s long enough for me to at least talk about the things I did to allow me to finally write consistently.
Why is a writing habit important?
I mentioned above that my focus has been on producing daily long-form content for Medium. If you’re a writer here, then perhaps that’s your ultimate goal too.
The truth is, though, that good writing and storytelling are at the heart of almost all creative work. Whether you’re creating a video for YouTube, long-form content for a podcast or a short-form post for a social network, a regular writing habit will not only improve your skill but also provide you with better engagement with your audience.
We don’t even need to limit this habit to creating online content. Traditional office environments require pitches to sell, presentations to convince and white papers to inform.
However we’re trying to communicate, it all starts with well-written content. So let’s look at some ways that we can improve our skills through regular, daily writing.
1. Fight for your time to write
I’d heard the advice of “finding time to write” several times, but it wasn’t until I committed to keep that time free that I found the most progression in my writing.
For me, that meant blocking out an hour in my calendar every morning, but that may not work for everyone. Finding a time when you’re most productive and least likely to be interrupted is usually a good starting point.
Once you’ve found that time though, fight to protect it. Block calls and move meetings — only give up that time for the most important emergencies.
2. Plan your content
Sitting down to a blank screen is the worst feeling for any writer, so make it easy on yourself and plan what you’re going to write about ahead of time.
I have a content calendar stored in Notion that has titles for articles that I want to write over the next seven days. Once a week, I sit down for half an hour and come up with another week’s content.
Then, each evening, I take ten minutes to choose one of the titles and sketch out the structure of it. Usually, that just means key points and sub-titles. That way, when I sit down to write the next morning, I’m not greeted by a blank page — more of a fill-in-the-gaps exercise.
The elephant in the room here is obviously how to generate the ideas that you write about.
For this I like to think about writing for my shadow: that’s to say the person I was two years ago. What do I know now that would have been useful to that person? What have I learned over that time that could be of interest to others?
That’s usually good for at least a week’s content but to be able to write over the longer term, I tend to use the 4 A Framework to generate more titles off the same ideas.
3. Get Focused
We do our best work when we’re fully focused on the task at hand. Make that easier on yourself by turning off all notifications or leaving your phone in another room.
I work in the Apple ecosystem and have set up a “Writing” focus mode that blocks all notifications (except those that come from my wife!).
I run this using the Pomodoro Technique (explained here to ensure that I’m not distracted by emails or text messages that may arrive in the middle of my writing.
4. Avoid the desire for your writing to be ‘perfect’
Hitting the ‘Publish’ button is better than aiming for perfect when it comes to writing over the long term.
There have been pieces of content where I’ve played around with phrasing for ages or wondered whether I should swap out one adverb for another (or maybe just go crazy and remove it altogether!) but the truth is that, in my experience, there is very little correlation between the amount of time you spend editing a piece and the number of views that it gets.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t take pride in your work — you absolutely should. Just don’t spend ages stewing the little stuff aiming for perfection, when you can hit ‘Publish’ instead.
The time you would have wasted is time that you can use gaining feedback from your audience to gauge whether its something you should write about in more detail in the future.
5. Overcome procrastination
As the saying goes, “The best time to start a writing habit was two years ago. The next best time is now”
There will always be an opportunity to say that you’ll get around to kicking off your writing once something else has finished.
The way around this for me was to remind myself why I wanted a writing habit. There are some mornings that I can’t wait to sit down and start writing, and yet there are others when it’s a real struggle.
Those mornings are the times when it’s so useful to see an hour already blocked out in my calendar. I see that time as already being part of my day and I remind myself that it’s there because I want and need to grow my writing business aggressively.
Go easy on yourself
Habits don’t get formed overnight. While we’d all like to become regular writers, trying to go from zero to hero in a short space of time will likely have the opposite effect. Just ask James Clear:
Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations (Atomic Habits)
Therefore, I’ve tried to build things up slowly. I started committing to writing one article a week. Then three articles a week and now I’m aiming for five — switching off completely at the weekend.
Even then, though, life will get in the way. Despite all of the steps mentioned above, there have been mornings when I haven’t been able to write. Typically that’s due to priorities involving my family.
When that happens, I have learned to go easy on myself and make sure that it doesn’t happen two days in a row. From experience, I can say that missing two days can easily turn into a week.
A week can easily turn into a month and before I knew it, my habit had evaporated again.
Commit to your writing, but understand that you’re playing the long game.
One last thing
If you found the article above useful, then there are three things you can do to support my writing:
- Hit those clapping hands so that other people with your interests will become aware of it. Hopefully, they’ll find it useful too
- Follow me here on Medium so that you become the first to know when similar content is posted
- Subscribe to my weekly newsletter which focuses on how I’m building out a writing side hustle and the lessons that I’m learning as I aim to work on my own terms.
