Writing / Creativity

Why I Changed My Mind About Writing on Multiple Pieces at the Same Time

I fooled myself. Here’s how I do it better now.

If you’re a writer, I’m sure you’re like me — you have over 100 drafts.

When I have time to write, I open the list and pick anything to write on.

For a long time, I thought this behavior made sense.

I write step by step if I can, and if I can’t think of anything, I pick another draft — all very relaxed.

Now I’m stuck on almost 200 drafts and realized that it couldn’t go on like this anymore. Here’s why and what I’m doing differently now.

We deceive ourselves about productivity

Let’s face it; if you write something but never publish it, you’ve wasted your time. All the drafts we have are worth nothing so far. Still, every time I write a draft, I feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I want to write. I want to write, publish, and see people read it. But our brains reward us for partial steps, like writing alone.

I feel incredibly productive when I’ve worked on several drafts — even if I haven’t published any afterward. This is self-delusion and comes mainly from setting goals like “write 2000 words per day”.

It wastes too much time

When you jump back and forth between drafts, you can’t continue writing immediately. You have to read the previous text at least once and possibly think about it even longer. That takes time.

When it comes to productivity, time is not equal to time.

Time spent not writing doesn’t get you closer to your goal. This time is, for example, the time you need to read in.

I like to call this a time fixed cost — it’s time you have to spend regardless of whether you really type something.

If you write an entire text in one go, you only have the fixed time cost once. But if you need several attempts, you have the fixed costs several times.

The bottom line is that the constant jumping back and forth between drafts consumes a lot of time unnecessarily.

You may lose the creative momentum

The further I go through my list of drafts, the more frustrating it gets. Some I last worked on several months ago. After reading in, I have a lot of questions in my head.

What does this mean? Did I already check if the headline is okay? What was that one more idea I wanted to include?

I don’t remember much — just that I started writing in a frenzy and was excited. But what prompted me to write, what other ideas I had, I can’t remember.

The sad truth is that you can’t write everything every day.

There are days when you have more ideas than others. There are days when you’re in a certain mood. There are days when you want to share a personal experience.

If I’m in a state like that and I can’t finish the text on the same day, there’s no going back. The ideas are gone, the mood is gone, my creative momentum is gone.

What I do differently now

Ok, so working on several drafts at once is not a good idea. But getting every text done in one piece isn’t easy either — here’s how I try anyway.

Insight is the first way to improve. Now that I’ve realized how much time my many drafts cost me, I’m motivated to work better. Instead of realizing that the article is not a good idea after many attempts, I now speed up the process.

First, it can be beneficial to get old drafts out of the way. I took a few days exclusively for this. Thereby I have finished & published Drafts; others got deleted.

What motivated me was that I had more drafts than published articles — so there was a lot of potential within reach.

Once you get a big chunk of your drafts out of the way, you can focus on new things. Here’s how.

When I have an idea, I immediately brainstorm it in detail. I used to write the idea down for later — now I formulate it in full to take advantage of the creative momentum.

When brainstorming, try to lay the foundation in a short time. There is a small checklist:

• Exists at least a mediocre headline?
• Are there enough subpoints?
• Is there enough to say about each subpoint?
• Is the topic interesting?
• Can I write an exciting introduction to it?

If I can tick all the items, that’s a good sign. Then I move on to the work phases — for some of these phases, I use the Pomodoro technique.

Here are the steps:

1. Fill the individual points of the article with content
2. Proofread to check if there is a well-structured text.
3. Look for errors with Grammarly & other tools.
4. Proofread again to see if the corrected version is still readable.

The trick with the Pomodoro technique is that you set yourself a time limit. For example, I don’t spend too much time writing without having read it at all.

Additional tip: Put your smartphone out of sight when working.

That is why & how I get back more to just a draft at a time. Thank you for reading!