Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Never Hit the Backspace Key

The Backspace key is supposed to be used when you are editing your piece, and not when you are writing it. Those are two separate processes, and if you don't separate them your productivity as a writer will be terrible.

If you work online you know that content is the corner stone of any blog or website. The more unique and useful content you publish, the better. In fact even Google likes that. The more content you put on your website, the higher the trust Google will have on it.

The question then becomes: how can you increase your productivity  as a writer so that you can write more content (without compromising the quality, obviously). One trick most people don't use is to separate the writing and the editing processes.

Most people write like these: they write a couple of words, re-read what they just wrote, think about it, delete one word, and then proceed to finish the sentence. As you can see, the process is very
inefficient, because you are doing many things at the same time.

A much better approach is to separate the two things. First you'll write. During this phase your goal is to simply put words down. You shouldn't care if they make sense, or if they are grammatically correct. You should just write the words down.

Once you are done writing, then you'll pass to the editing phase, and that's when you revise the sentences, to see whether or not they make sense, to fix the spelling and grammatical mistakes and so on.

By focusing on each phase separately you'll be able to drastically improve your efficiency on both.

The problem is that entering into a pure "writing state" is difficult. Most of us have the habit of writing and editing at the same time, and habits, as you probably know, are hard to drop.

There are two tricks you can use to achieve this: the first one if to commit to never use the backspace. When on the writing phase you'll never delete anything, you'll just write new words.

You can only go forward, not backward. I don't care if what you just wrote makes no sense, you go forward no matter what, as you'll have time to fix it on the editing phase.

Another trick, slightly more drastic, is to not look at what you are writing at all. You can look at the keyboard, for instance, or if you are stubborn you can turn your monitor off. Once you are done writing you turn it back on and proceed to the editing phase.

If you don't believe me give it a try. Use either of these methods and check whether or not your writing productivity will increase.

Now let me turn the monitor back on to see whether or not I made some spelling mistakes...