8 tips that help me write this publication

I've been asked a few times how I've maintained my posting frequency. It's something I struggled with when I started blogging so here's what I've learned.

Photo by Philippe D. on Unsplash

I've been asked a few times how I've maintained my posting frequency. It's something I struggled with when I started blogging so here's what I've learned.

Here’s a list of things that have helped me:

1. Have a perspective
   I write about my lived experiences. That’s a particular perspective I’ve chosen for this publication. It helps to have established a perspective - it takes the effort out of finding an angle for each topic.
   

2. Know who your audience is
   I am clear about my audience for the publication. I write specifically to help software development leaders by sharing my experiences and what I believe I learned from them.
   

3. Be a habitual synthesiser of the knowledge you acquire
   As the majority of my writing is about my work experiences it helps that when I work I take a lot of notes and regularly try to take stock of what I am learning. I distil it into bullet point notes in a tool such as Workflowy. Reflecting on your work and improving how you distil your thinking for others helps you when you work. It’s also immensely helpful given I am writing about these distillations.
   

4. Have a plan / communicate your plan
   You will see a few posts in my archive which lay out a rough writing plan. I’ve often started a year laying out the themes I intend to tackle. I’ve also posted a skeletal structure of the sorts of topics I’d love to cover whilst exploring those themes. I’ve always got something to consider writing about if I don’t have a particular inspiration locked and loaded.
   
   I also use my drafts to jot down post titles or dot-point outlines of posts when I have an idea but might be on the move or too busy to write the post itself. This means I am rarely in the situation where I am looking at the daunting blank page - something which can give one the yips and lead to writer’s block; that odd phenomenon where the very thought of ‘what if I can’t think of something to write?’ becomes a self-fulfilling nightmare.
   

5. Commit to a writing cadence
   Commit to your writing frequency. I experimented with 6 days a week for several months when I stopped working. I maintained it once I started working again a few months later, to prove I could. I’ve adjusted to two posts a week as it became apparent that even dedicated readers were struggling to keep up with 6x 1000+ word posts a week :)
   

6. Publish at the end of each writing session
   Perfection is the enemy of good. We can convince ourselves that there’s a huge audience ready to critique every detail of our posts. For the audience of my publication, the reality is that different groups read it in different channels and contexts.
   
   For instance, there’s an audience that reads posts in their email from my Substack. There’s a larger group who discover my posts via LinkedIn or Twitter. I publish with knowledge of the size of different audiences and some idea of what interests them. For instance, I know the Substack audience is a dedicated audience, a vocal subset of which participates in the discussion.
   
   So I feel confident to publish something which I know I have put good effort into but may have some imperfections. I edit my posts further as I share them with channels where the audience is larger and more transient. Without this approach I know from experience I would not get my posts out and I wouldn’t get the feedback that helps me improve them.
   
   Edit: as an example, I’ve already edited this post since publishing - I improved the formatting to aid readability and I even added additional tips.
   

7. Aim for one key idea per post
   This may be a bit more specific to the goals of my publication although I suspect many expertise-focused publications may benefit. Often when first writing a post and publishing per the above tip I may find I’ve covered more than one key idea in a post.
   
   Later when I go back to edit it I will break up the post into multiple posts so each idea can be separated and provided appropriate attention. This has the benefit of the posts being shorter, tighter and more appropriate to be shared as a perspective on an idea. E.g. “oh you are having this issue? here’s a post that speaks specifically to that”.
   
   The linking between posts becomes very important because it allows you to build more complex ideas from earlier posts as the posts you link to each communicate an atomic idea.
   

8. Don’t miss publishing twice in a row
   I read (and also saw) this tip from James Clear. It suggested that a moment when people stopped a positive habit they were forming was when they skipped a commitment. This felt very true to me and felt like a reason I’d used it in the past. My failure to keep one commitment when life inevitably got in the way became the reason to skip the next one. Like I’d ruined my run. I think this is a very human response. James’ advice was instead to make your commitment never skip twice.
   
   This was a more resilient approach which encouraged a different perspective on the next commitment. I was recently ill (nothing major, just successive illnesses my boy brought home from kindergarten) and then had family visiting us here in New Zealand. This reframing of commitments helped me acknowledge that I’d need to pause and this wasn’t a failing. I’d pick right back up when I could.

I hope these tips are helpful. They helped me. I’ve started and stopped writing many times over two decades. These are the things that have helped me write most consistently.

Have you thought about writing? If you have but you aren’t, or you’ve tried but struggled with consistency then maybe something above might help. Let me know what challenges you’ve faced and what you’ve tried. If you are writing and have published in a longer form such as books, scripts or other forms then let me know what works for you. I am still trying to level up.