Triple Your Writing Speed Through Preparation

Do you prefer to reach your writing goals late in the evening or early in the afternoon? What if you could be faster without working more?

I have been publishing books since 2015 and have learned a lot in that time. My writing style has improved, I’ve understood how book marketing works, and I now know exactly who my target audience is.

But the most valuable insight has nothing to do with storytelling or marketing. Before I could finish a story and market a book, I first had to develop a stable writing routine. It had to be a routine that I could keep up over the years without burning out.

In the first few years, it was hard because my writing routine was not ideal. I would sit down at the same time every morning and start writing, but sometimes it would take me eight hours to write a certain number of words, whereas, on other days, it took me only four.

For a long time, I didn’t understand why I often made such slow progress. But I had to find an answer because sooner or later, these frustrating days would have eaten me up.

So I added another task to my daily workload. I now read everything I could get my hands on about productivity and motivation. I thought that there must be a magic trick somewhere. I thought that this trick would lead to me sitting at my laptop in the morning whistling happily and with unlimited power. I would effortlessly work through hours of concentrated work, and the ideas would just bubble up. In short, I believed that I had a motivation problem above all.

But little by little, it became clear that the answer had to lie elsewhere. I began to understand that motivation is not a prerequisite for productivity but a side effect. I realized that the more productive my day was, the more motivated I was. But this realization did not really help me. But it led to the fact that I was no longer primarily concerned with the question of motivation, but with the topic of productivity.

I compared my working with the most frequently mentioned tips for increasing productivity and quickly found what I was looking for. There was actually one thing that I hadn’t paid attention to for a long time, but which all experts believe is essential for a productive day.

This one thing was the topic of preparation.

Until then, I believed that I was always very well prepared. After all, I always started my day with detailed planning. I wrote a list of things I wanted to do that day, checked my sales figures to see if I was on my way to achieving my monthly goal, and I cleared my email inbox.

However, this never led to me becoming any faster at writing.

Productivity experts saw the topic of preparation entirely differently than I did.

Everything that I considered good preparation was just unnecessary ballast in their eyes.

Writing is not planning

At some point, I realized that I had made a crucial mistake for many years. I had never adequately separated the writing process from the planning process.

Every article and every story lives from telling certain events or ideas in a fixed order. This means that until we know what exactly we want to write, we cannot begin writing. If we do, the result will be so useless that we will have to rework it several times. We have to repair plot holes or restructure argumentation chains.

We can avoid all this if we plan what we want to write before we write. And by before, I don’t mean immediately before, but at least one day earlier.

Planning is an analytical process that requires utterly different brain regions than the creative part of writing. This means that planning and writing are two fundamentally different working modes. When we first plan in the morning what the next chapter of our book will look like or structure our article argumentatively, we calibrate our brain to the planning mode.

Switching to the writing mode immediately afterward is too much for us. Even if we have entered a flow state after some time while planning, this flow is immediately over when we want to start translating our plans into written words.

To get back into the flow state while writing, it takes a certain amount of time. So instead of starting from scratch just once a day and gradually working our way into a flow state, we take it upon ourselves to do this twice.

The morning is for work, not for planning

Once I understood that I had been making fundamental mistakes regarding my productivity for a long time, I changed the way I work.

Today, before I go to bed in the evening, I pick up my cell phone once more and plan the next working day.

This planning is less extensive than the one I had done in the morning, but it is far more effective.

In the morning, I always tried to plan the next chapter or article very carefully. Today I write down only keywords in the evening. I plan a rough plot for the next chapter of my book and formulate one or two blog posts topics. Additionally, I already develop headlines for my articles.

When I have done this, I put the cell phone away, and the workday is over. I can sleep very well because I know that I will start the next day well prepared.

These ideas, which were written down shortly before, continue to work in my head during the night. I leave it to my subconscious to fill in the blanks in my rough plan and trust that it will work.

Now, when I sit down in the morning to write, I immediately know what I want to write and start without thinking about it again. I have my notes from the evening before, which tell me how I should proceed, and my subconscious has done its job. Even if an idea seemed vague the night before, it is now clear and unambiguous.

I reach my flow state quickly and stay in this state all the time because I don’t have to leave the operating mode of my brain until I reach my daily goal.

Since I have been working like this, I can usually get off work between three and four in the afternoon. Before that, I often sat in front of the computer until seven or eight in the evening.

Clarity leads to speed

Those who know what they are doing will reach their goal faster every time. When we travel, it goes without saying that we research all flight connections in advance, buy the tickets in advance and reserve the hotels long before the trip. The rental car is already waiting for us at the destination and in our suitcase is everything we need on the trip.

If you write without planning in advance, you are like a traveler who sets off spontaneously. If I decide to travel to London and go to the airport now, I don’t know when I’ll get a plane ticket and may even have to take a hotel room, because a plane doesn’t leave until tomorrow.

In London I would have to find a free hotel room first, of which I don’t know yet what it costs and if I can afford it at all.

Then I might find out that I don’t have enough clothes and have to buy everything I need in the next department store.

While the one who has planned the trip long in advance is already sitting at the hotel bar and enjoying the vacation, the spontaneous one is still roaming the big city trying to organize his future stay somehow. One is completely relaxed, while the other is almost losing his mind from stress and frustration.

Who do you want to be? Do you want to reach your destination quickly, or do you want to make unnecessary detours?

You decide.

René Junge a published author writing on The Full Time Writer

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