Blogging tips
Writing 7 Articles Per Week — Sustainably
And without burning out
I guess I publish a lot on Medium. I passed 100 stories in early May, and my total now sits at over 170.
The question is, how to do this without burning out?
In my view, burnout has less to do with time and workload, and more to do with control and motivation. After all:
- We don’t get burned out by our hobbies.
- We don’t feel burned out when things feel easily manageable and under control.
From the start, I tried to write daily on here. And it was a strain on my creativity at times, both to think of new story ideas, and to keep on top of the demands of writing so much new content!
I remember one day, early in my Medium writing career, I was on a gruelling 36-hour trip to London involving sleeping on a train both there and back. I was delivering a professional workshop, but in the few hours of downtime between trains I went to cafes… and tried to write as many draft blog posts as I could!
It was too much — I needed to find a different approach.
While writing a story per day might be good for the Medium algorithm, it needs to be done in a sustainable way. I want to share two tips that have really transformed things for me:
1. A backlog of stories
You can’t operate on the basis of write-publish, write-publish. That’s an approach which doesn’t have any give.
And with no slack in the system, things are going to fall apart at some stage.
You need a backlog — a set of at least five or ten ready-to-go drafts. That means that you can handle busy periods with work or family demands (you probably need to take into account vacations, too).
That way, if you have a long work trip or some other set of unusual demands, you can allow yourself to relax, knowing that the blogging output is in the bag.
I wrote about this approach in more detail here:
2. A schedule
A second element that I have developed much more recently is the use of a weekly publishing schedule.
This means that for each day of the week, I have a very good idea in advance what kind of story I am going to release… and I generally have each one ready to go.
No decisions needed!
As each day’s story follows a roughly similar format to the week before, I can even copy-paste previous drafts and just edit/update them with new content. This saves time on formatting.
My schedule has started to shape up as follows:
- Monday: A list of creative writing prompts.
- Tuesday: A chapter of my Sorcerer web-novel.
- Wednesday: A chapter or two of a ‘Choose your own’ fiction story.
- Thursday: more creative writing, or else a one-off piece (like this one).
- Friday: a craft-focused article (e.g. this).
- Saturday: a personal reflection and summary of what I published across the week (see the first one here).
- Sunday: a curated list of reading (like this).
Okay… the days don’t always work out precisely, depending on things like how long publications take to review drafts. But it gives me something to go on.
Your own schedule might look quite different from mine, but I promise that this approach helps to maintain that sense of control, while keeping things fresh and fun.
Adding the strategies together
Recently, I have benefited from using both of these strategies. The schedule simplifies drafting and cuts down on mental effort. Meanwhile the backlog allows you to work around the curveballs that life puts in the way.
I have already written my ‘writing prompts’ stories for the next couple Mondays, for example!
All in all, I have found that while both strategies are powerful, they are all the better in combination.
I hope these two tips help you to ensure that you are creative and productive in a healthy and sustainable way.
Before I sign off, a shoutout to some authors whose collaborative fiction I have read recently:
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