Tag Archives forWriting Productivity

Confessions of a Compulsive ‘Word Hoarder’

In college I had this problem whenever I went to write a paper. The professors would always assign some arbitrary length—”10 pages, double spaced.” Invariably I’d be working on my draft, and around 8 pages in I’d slam into a wall. I’d covered all my points, said everything I wanted to say. Where on earth […]

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5 Principles For Beating Analysis Paralysis

Bewildered subscriber Aziz writes: Josh, I am asking you for the last time (for the day) How do you constantly keep on coming up with mini meaningful and actionable advice almost daily? Seriously? I have been drowning in analysis paralysis and you keep on cranking things out. HOW? Unfortunately I am no stranger to Mr. […]

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How Writing Software Helped Me Write Better Prose

Once I had a chance to interview one of the best-known bloggers in the programming niche. Toward the end of the interview, I made a rookie blunder: I asked a question with the main purpose of trying to impress the guy, who at the time I really looked up to. I don’t remember exactly what […]

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2 Rules for Writing 30,000 Words a Month

Seems like once a week I get an email from a subscriber who’s amazed that I can crank out these emails so consistently, day after day. How are you so disciplined, they say. Confession time: Writing consistently has long been a HUGE struggle for me. I’ve wanted to blog consistently since, oh, about 2009. Back […]

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Snarling Grouch’s Morning Writing Routine

Got an email the other week from a reader named Roos who wants to email his list more but finds it a struggle. Roos mused: Dan Kennedy says fatigue makes cowards of us all. I have trouble writing emails in the later time of the day. Especially the ones that should both entertain and sell. […]

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Your focus is finite

So why am I putting in all this effort to write faster, anyway? If I want to be more productive, shouldn’t I just focus on carving out more time to write? After all, I can write just as many words per day just by increasing the amount of time I spend at the keyboard, can’t […]

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Why “just write” is stupid advice

A golfer sighs in frustration as yet another ball slices hard and disappears into the woods. An old timer, who’s spent the last few minutes observing the young hacker’s herky-jerky swing, smiles and offers his sage advice: “Just hit the ball, son.” A programmer glowers at his screen as his app coughs up exception after […]

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Breakthrough: Writing 2,000 words in less than two hours

Yesterday something inside me clicked, and I just wrote. The last couple of weeks have been a mental struggle. I’m ripping out long-time habits and replacing them with better ones. My old writing process was broken and slow—but it was comfortable. And overcoming lifelong habits is never easy. But I’m determined to make it work, […]

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The dangers of faking your outline

Writer’s block isn’t something I usually struggle with, but I ran smack into a wall yesterday. It was pretty unexpected, and working around it taught me a valuable lesson about outlining. I’d cranked through my daily practice writing session in record time, and when I cracked open Scrivener to work on my book, I had […]

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Two strategies I’m using to improve my outlining skills

I used to hate outlining. It was frustrating and didn’t seem to help my writing at all. When I’d sit down to write, I’d scribble out a few bullet points that were related to what I wanted to write about. These points were usually a loose collection of thoughts that centered around a single theme […]

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The real reason I write slowly

In college, I spent a semester in Washington, D.C. as an intern at the Washington Times. The department I worked with covered cultural trends, which gave me the opportunity to do my favorite kind of writing—in-depth features. I loved the newspaper atmosphere and I enjoyed my assignments. But looking back, I wasn’t very productive. I […]

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My writing practice plan

To meet my ambitious publishing goals for the year, I’m going to have to step up my game. By this time next year, I plan to publish four non-fiction books in the 20,000- to 30,000-word range. Last year I spent about six months working on a book to get to around 15,000 to 18,000 words, […]

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How to set realistic writing goals

I’ve set big writing goals for myself several times in the past. This year, my goal was to publish 100,000 words between books and blog posts. Prior to that, I’d tried setting daily word count goals, like writing 500 words a day, and time-based goals, like writing for one hour every morning. But I’d never […]

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How I’m going to write four books in 12 months

If you search DuckDuckGo for “how to write a book,” you might be tempted to just give up on the whole idea. The top-ranking results are littered with words and phrases like “torture,” “horrible experience,” “didn’t make any money.” The conventional wisdom is that writing books is an arduous process and one that’s not really […]

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Why I’m publishing my ebook 100 words at a time

I’m writing my ebook in the least efficient way possible: Every day, I publish an update of at least 100 words. And you know what? It’s working great. Publishing 100-word chunks throws the “writing process” out the window Writing involves several discrete steps: organization and outlining, research, writing the first draft, editing the final draft, […]

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