My review post of 2024 was an outlier, I didn't measure but I would guess that was at least four hours of writing and another accumulated two hours of jotting down notes for it over the previous few weeks
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Oh, I forgot to mention: lower your standards! Waiting until a piece feels as good as you can get it is a recipe for an empty blog and a huge folder full of drafts
I try to hit publish while I am still unhappy with what I've written
Also helps to establish a fast workflow so you can minimise time from idea to published post. I know it’s held me back when I’ve had to log into CMS on desktop machine, forced to assign a category for every post, etc.
I used to try and wrap every post up with a neat conclusion... my writing productivity went up a whole lot when I gave myself permission to just stop writing when I had run out of things to say!
Adding a summary or conclusion is great if you can think of a satisfying way to wrap up, as long as you can avoid procrastinating on hitting publish because you don't feel like the post has a good enough ending
I'll do that if I can, but allowing myself to skip that step really did increase the likelihood of something making it out of my drafts - and I don't think the quality reduction actually mattered
Related: I had the very enlightening experience once of writing a blog post that went on for pages and pages exploring an argument, premise-body-conclusion school essay style. Then I looked at it, scrapped it and just said what I wanted to say in four paragraphs.
Check out the HBO south park documentary if you're bored sometime, it's short and pretty interesting even to non-viewers. Focuses on the era where they were turning out a 30 minute animated show every week, and the psychological toll of that for creators with high standards.
Cue the "I am in this photo and I don't like it" meme 😭
How do you treat posts that you want to polish? Do you ever go back and edit posts, expand with an addendum etc? Or once you hit 'Publish' you treat it as final?
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I try to hit publish while I am still unhappy with what I've written
Or a summary of the resources you mentioned in the post
How do you treat posts that you want to polish? Do you ever go back and edit posts, expand with an addendum etc? Or once you hit 'Publish' you treat it as final?