Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published over 500 novels, short stories, books, and articles in his lifetime. He was truly a prolific writer. How did he achieve this level of output?
Recently a friend shared an article with me discussing Asimov’s secret weapon.
In it, Asimov is quoted from his book, It’s Been a Good Life, as saying this:
Continue reading “Judge Less, Write More”
Most computers perform at their best when you first turn them on. It’s because their memory is as clear as it ever is, leaving plenty of resources for operation. In most operating systems, every time a piece of software runs, even if it is closed, there is still a lingering bit of resources that’s not fully cleared.
Our human brains run similarly. I find that the best time to be creative is first thing in the morning, before a bunch of stuff has started opening up in my head. Once I have started dealing with outside stimuli, my mind starts to get cluttered up. Some of that stuff sticks around, even after I have moved past it.
That makes this time, first thing in the morning, a powerful time to write and record. My mind is clear and full of my ideas.
What I try not to do is to check email or consume social media first thing in the morning. There are many things that I might find in either place which can hijack my mental processes. It is so easy to come across a piece of information on email or social media which snags out attention and holds a piece of it even after we have moved on.
This is, to some degree, by design. Most social media platforms want to keep you engaged, so they feed to you the kind of content that will stick in your mind. Contentious topics. Upsetting topics. Topics that you feel the need to engage with.
We see something that bothers or upsets us, and we feel the need to respond. Even if we resist the temptation, it sticks in the back of our mind. Of course, if we do respond it is much worse. Our comment will naturally draw other comments.
Suddenly our attention is consumed by an argument that doesn’t matter, which we didn’t need to have, often with someone who is not particularly important to us.
I encourage you to recognize the power and value of that time in the morning when your mind is freshly booted up, and all those programs haven’t started running.
Use that time to be creative.
Use that time to create content.
Use that time to meditate or journal.
Use that time as only that time can be used.
Invariably, our mind will clutter up again with all the concerns and conflicts of the day. But take advantage of that precious moment at the beginning of the day.
If you write just 500 words every morning, you’ll have written 182,500 words by the end of the year. Something to think about, before you think about everything else.
The idea of time management is being supplanted by the idea of energy management.
My board gaming friends may understand the concept of Actions or Action Points. In a game like Dominion, you get one Action per turn, but some cards will give you additional actions which let you do more things.
We may think that we have 8 hours in a day, what we really have is a combination of time and energy which results in being able to perform a certain number of actions per day. If we were machines, the number of actions we could perform would be a simple function of how many minutes it takes to perform the task divided into the number of minutes we have available.
Since we are human, however, energy ends up being much more of a factor. Most people get as little as 3-4 hours of work done during a typical 8 hour work day. Why? Energy management.
There are some tasks that give me energy, give me additional Actions in my turn. Running a coaching session gives me energy. I do 6 sessions back to back and the last one would be as good as the first, possibly better, because it energizes me.
Creating content is another such activity. I can write 3,000 words in a sitting. I cannot, however, write two blog posts back to back.
Why? Because creating a blog post, is more than just writing. I need to tag it. I need to share it to Facebook and LinkedIn. I need to do other administrative tasks to make sure people see it. That consumes Actions.
Different people gain Actions, gain energy, from different types of activity. Different people find different tasks easier or harder.
A coaching trainer I am working with shared that he does not like to do more than 3, and preferably not more than 2, sessions per day because it wears him out. I could do twice that and be ready for more.
Recently it was suggested that I should repurpose my content. Specifically that I should record video as I record the audio of my Morning Motivation podcast. This makes sense if creating content is hard and repurposing is easy. For many people this may well be the case, but not for me.
Morning Motivation is my fourth attempt at a podcast, and my most successful. It is so successful because it is so logistically simple for me to create. It takes approximately 11 minutes start to finish to record and post an episode. I will usually create all the episodes for a week in one or two sittings. I spend more time recording the audio than I do sharing the content, and that’s just the way I like it.
One of the great things about audio is that I can edit out a flub in seconds as I record without leaving an artifact. Not so in video.
While it may seem like simply recording video as I record the audio would be simple, it would likely double the time it takes to create an episode. When I increase the friction on a task, I increase the chance that the task will stop getting done.
A better use of 11 minutes would be to take my camera and record a second video on the same topic that is 2-5 minutes long and share that. It may seem inefficient to create two pieces of content when I could repurpose one, but it is actually easier, it takes less Actions, to do it separately.
The same is true with transcribing the podcast. There is software that will turn speech to text that I could run the episodes through, but what I would have is a mess of errors with no punctuation. I would have to go back through every word, figure out what I was trying to say originally, and clean it up. Add to that the fact that we don’t write the same way we speak, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
You know what I can do in the same amount of time it would take to clean up an automated transcription? I could write an article!
That’s what I did on the topic of getting 1% better every day. I recorded it as an episode, then I wrote an article, then I recorded a TikTok, then I talked more about it in a Sunday Update of Morning Motivation. These four pieces of content did not feel like work to me because they were creating content. They also are all native to the platforms where they live.
In the same amount of time it would have taken to repurpose the first episode into multiple pieces, I created four pieces of content.
The place where repurposing does make sense is when you have an assistant. I can create content as easily as I can repurpose it. An assistant cannot create content for me, but they can take what I have, reedit it, transcribe it, clean it up, reshare it, and all the rest.
At some point it will make sense to hire such an assistant, but this is not that point for me.
For yourself, it is important to recognize what give you Actions and what consumes Actions. What can you do all day without a break or rest, and what drains your energy. Rather than looking at how much time something takes, look at how much energy it takes and strategize along those lines.
Find the things that you can do most efficiently and do more of that. Find the things that drain you and either hire someone else to do it or do as little of it as possible.