Are You Writing In The Most Efficient Way Possible?

By Dan Smith

August has been a busy month for me outside of work. I spent a week in London visiting family during the second week of the month, followed by a long weekend with friends an hour’s drive away last weekend and then this weekend we’re heading back down to London for 4 days.

All in all, I’ve had around 18 available working days, including weekends.

And then there’s the point that mid way through the month one of my regular clients increased their order. Great stuff in general, but I really could have done with it waiting until September.

So, due to the fact I had a month’s worth of work to do in under 3 weeks, I started thinking about how efficient my writing process was and if there was anyway I could improve my productivity.

Traditionally, I would receive a request from a client, have a quick look through it and put it to one side for a few days until I had completed the project that I was working on.

When the time would come to work on the next project, I’d open up a Word document, write down a few sentences that I thought I could use or which could come in useful, carry out some research or look for quotes / statistics, write the piece and then proof and edit it straight away.

And to be honest, it seemed pretty efficient.

However, I’m a big believer that there is always room for improvement and so I made 3 changes to my writing process.

1. Firstly, when I received a new order through, I’d spend 10 minutes jotting down some notes that could help me write the piece. I’d also check out some websites I use regularly for statistics and quotes to see if there was anything immediately obvious that could be of use,

2. Secondly, I decided I would leave the editing to the end of the whole project. I wondered whether going from writing to proofing to editing and then back to writing was lowering my productivity and was interested to see whether it would increase if I carried out all of the writing first, followed by all of the proofing and editing,

3. Finally, I wanted to try something that I haven’t done before, which was to complete a project in one sitting. Usually, I look at how many words are going to be needed approximately overall, look at how long I’ve got to the deadline and divide them up so that I write a small amount each day. This time, however, I was going to complete it all in one go.

Did it work?

Well, yes and no.

On the first point, I found that this is possibly the best thing I could do.

When I used to get an order of, for example, 20 articles, I would treat each one separately, not looking at the next until I’d finished one. This month, I discovered that if I jotted down ideas for each (or at least most) of them first, there was no time spent at the start of each article thinking what I was going to write about. Things just flowed a lot better.

Unfortunately, the second point is arguably the worst thing I’ve ever done. In fact, it was so bad I only did it for one project.

When I proof and edit each piece as I go along, it does mean that I spend extra time on it, but once it’s proofed and edited, it’s completed and out of the way completely.

I nearly cried when I realised I’d just finished the twentieth 500 word article but still had all 10,000 words to proof and edit.

My reaction to the third point is mixed. I experimented on it first with a 22 article project and completed over 11,000 words in around 12 hours. It was pretty intense and the words weren’t as free flowing after around 7,000, but it felt great when I woke up the next morning and could start a completely new piece of writing.

Considering this month has been pretty hectic, I’ve actually learnt a lot about my writing. I’ve realised that I’m not as efficient as I thought I was; that proofing and editing in one go really isn’t a good idea and that when I want to be, I can be a writing machine!

Do you have a writing process that you always stick to? Is it efficient? Have you ever tried changing it around to see if you can increase your productivity?