Content Creation — Is it a Waste of Time?

Wasting thousands of hours staring at a blank screen should never be a rite of passage.

Many writers, even famous ones, boast unwittingly about the thousands of hours they've spent staring at the big blank page. It's as though this inactivity and the amount of time wasted is a rite of passage. The problem is, these wasted hours never help these writers improve their skills, produce better habits, or deliver content on a consistent basis. It does just the opposite. What's worse, these wasted hours could have been avoided altogether simply by using the right tool for the job. The word processor, a "page-based" writing tool, is not the right tool for writing. Why? Because you feel like you're forced to organize the ideas in your head before you write them down in logical, linear order on the page.

The "page-based" Word Processor is the Villain

If you're using a "page-based" word processor to write, you're likely wasting a lot of time trying to organize the thoughts and ideas in your head and not getting your ideas written down.

Sit down to write a report, blog, essay, book, any document you can think of. After writing a paragraph or two, you're going to be confronted with the problem of trying to organize your thoughts before you write them down. Technically, you're no longer staring at a blank page, but what you are doing is wasting your time trying to sort things out in your mind because the page you're looking at demands order.

What you need to be doing at that exact instance is writing down all of your thoughts, organizing them, and expounding on them in written form. That is the fastest way to think, organize, ideate, and build a scaffolding on which you can expound to compose quality content at scale. If you had a tool that allowed you to do just that, nothing would be better or faster than that model. And guess what, I wouldn't be writing this article.

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"Page-based" word processors, such as MS Word and Google Docs, limit your ability to ideate and organize as you write because you have no place to put your tangential ideas. You have no place to put ideas that are out of order. You have no real way to organize your thoughts and no way of categorizing them.

What does this really mean in terms of your productivity as a writer? What measurement can you use to test it? Well, let's take a look at the inefficiency of a better than average blogger. (The name has been changed to protect the inefficient.)

Kimberly writes two articles a week for her "healthy cooking" blog. She knows her stuff 'cause she's an expert. She can type 40 words per minute. She likes to keep her articles to about 800-words or so. That means she should be able to pump out 800 words in 20 minutes flat. Right? Well, actually, Kimberly struggles to get it done in 2 to 3 hours. Even then, she often doesn't like the way it reads and won't post it. But that's another problem.

She finds that she'll often stray off topic in a few places, but the ideas she's including are "so great" she doesn't want to remove them because they'll be lost forever and she doesn't have a better place to put them. Kimberly struggles with writing efficiently because she's constantly coming up with new ideas and she's always trying to organize her thoughts in her head when she writes. The word processor she's using is getting in the way of her ability to write efficiently.

Kimberly thinks she's doing okay when she can get her two articles written and posted in the 4 to 6 hours each week she spends on them. On the surface, she seems pretty productive considering most of her blogger friends can't even do that. But let's take a look at what her inefficiency is costing her.

Kimberly spends, on average, 5 hours per week writing her two articles. She should be able to do it in at most 2 hours. That means she's throwing away 3 hours every week. Over a 1 year period, she is wasting 156 hours writing. 52 weeks x 3 hours per week = 156 hours. That's the equivalent of almost one month's work or a one month vacation.

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If you're a business person and you have employees who write for you, the above example should be cause for alarm. If your employees use a "page-based" word processor to write with, and they "write" 5 plus hours a week, there could be some serious time being wasted there.

So, what does an efficient writer look like?

1. When they're thinking about something they write it down.
2. Their first goal is all about building a massive organized library of their thoughts. It's this library of thoughts that they draw on when they sit down to write.
3. They're adding to their library of thoughts, every day. This habit is what separates them from the inefficient.
4. When a great thought or idea pops into their head, they write it down. When they're standing in line at the coffee shop, when they're walking the dog, when they're working, even when they're writing about something else, if a great idea pops into their head, they write it down.
5. They organize their ideas into groups and categories. This helps them find the ideas the moment they need them.
6. They re-reading their ideas and revising them, being careful to never erase the original idea.
7. They utilize speech-to-text on their smartphone to capture their thoughts and ideas because it's way faster than typing.
8. When someone asks them to explain their idea, they use speech-to-text to record it. There are so many ways to use speech-to-text, but that is for another article.
9. Every day, they're writing down what they're thinking about and why. This helps them articulate their ideas.
10. Writing is the tool they use to solve problems. For them, writing is thinking. 

When you develop the habit of writing down your thoughts every time you have a great idea or organizing your thoughts every time you think of a better way to say something, you will be developing a habit of writing that will make you more efficient as a writer. When you do sit down to write, you'll have a worked out and stretched your writing muscle and you'll be ready to write efficiently.

This is oversimplified, but it will give you an idea of where you stand. The math is easy.

Typing speed per minute x number of minutes = total number of expected words.

Example: 40 words per minute x 50 minutes = 2,000 words.

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If anytime you get up from writing and the number of words you've written in the time you've spent isn't at least half your typing speed, you know you're inefficient and need to continue working on your library of thoughts. Example: 600 words / 50 minutes = average typing speed of 12 words per minute which is less than half your 40-word per minute typing speed. You're wasting time. Yikes!

Focus on building a library of your thoughts and keep on building it every day, all throughout the day. Don't get trapped into thinking it's okay to sit down and stare at the blank page or that wasting hours and hours being unproductive is really a rite of passage. It's just not the way to write. The only way you'll get to the place where you can stop wasting time and can sit down to write for a full hour at your top typing speed is if you record and organize your ideas the moment they come to you every day.

Build the library, which is your rite of passage, and you'll stop wasting time.