Radical! Awesome! Mega!

To build myself up to a consistent and reliable level of productivity, I’ve taken to allocating 30–60 minutes to sit/stand in isolation and write nonstop. Mostly I’ll pull a topic off my Trello board and riff on it, but sometimes I’ll just type whatever’s in my head and follow my thoughts wherever they go. So far it’s working incredibly well, at least in terms of turning my ideas into properly articulated arguments.

This was always the purpose of my private stream-of-consciousness journal. What I’ve realised this week is how effectively it can turn an unproductive morning or day into a productive one. If the first ten minutes are rubbish, usually I’m much better structured and more cogent by the end.

Although I now have the bones of a few solid posts, tidying them up for publication is still beyond me, for now. This is as much down to my neurodivergent struggles as my need to build skills and establish habits.

I’m still reluctant to set myself goals for publishing on Medium because I don’t know when I can find the focus and confidence to get that final polish done. I’d like it to be within a week, but if I set that goal and fail to meet it, I’ll feel worse about myself and less confident about my ability. So, for now I’ll keep doing this as often as possible. If I write 50 drafts and publish nothing, at least I’ll have 20 posts close to completion.

When I decided to write again, it was the joy of writing that drew me back.

Then I discovered the possibility of writing on sites like Medium, where writing is read and a small amount of money might even come in. But I was still focused on writing for my own satisfaction.

Then I read a bit more about how a few writers have made a career from writing on Medium. I watched loads YouTube videos on form, audience, titles, the lot. But I still knew I wanted to write for its own sake.

Then I realised my writing can develop and improve if I work on it, so I made piles of notes about how best to write for success. I would definitely work that into my plan, but it would only ever come second to writing for pleasure.

I spent the next week or so coming up with ideas, building structures and salient points through brainwashing and bullet points. I even tried writing complete articles from those notes, but I couldn’t get a piece finished to my self-imposed standards. It was increasingly frustrating to be sat down, focused, determined, but not able to produce anything worthy of publication.

Here I am a month later (including two weeks of illness), only just realising that my aim has shifted. I’ve been so hellbent on writing to a high standard that I’ve still not published anything on Medium.

So, in remembering my incentive to write in the first place, and realising how sharply and unexpectedly I’ve lost my way, I’m now wrenching myself back on track. That doesn’t mean I’ll have something up on Medium tomorrow or even this week, but it does mean I’ll publish what I like writing without too much second-guessing, not what I think will set me up for some objective judgement of success.

I’ve been riffing off the concept of conquering writer’s block by lowering my standards, even though I don't believe what I've experienced this week is technically writer's block.

This morning I used my private stream-of-consciousness journal to write a post about a basic concept, and knocked out 550 words in 20 minutes. The piece will need a second draft, but the idea is now on paper. I could feel it taking shape as I typed.

This might be my initial approach to every post from now on: take a topic from my pile of topics, riff on it for as long there’s something to be said, note what’s valuable, write it again from those chunks. I've amassed dozens of topics against which I've written nothing at all, so I should definitely try this technique with as many of them as I need to. Perhaps that's how I'll come to understand which topics have sufficient merit to end up as published pieces: I assume I'll also come up with new topics as I write, or even find the topic shifting as I progress. That's all positive, and I do think it will complement the way I work.