My Writing Process

As a 100 articles celebration!

Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash

I’ve been writing for over a year now. In the last year, my process has changed considerably. Interestingly, I follow some agile principles when writing — time boxing every article writing process, while letting the mind drift in the pre-writing phases.

As the 100th article, I thought it would be fitting if I showed you my writing process, with hopes that you too can start writing. The more content that is out there, the better it is for us.

The entire process is broken into 3 phases: Thinking, Writing, and Publishing.

Thinking

I’m constantly on the lookout for inconsistencies, consistencies, and behaviors in my work. I consume a lot of content — from podcasts to interviews, to reading articles. I engage in product discussions with product managers I know (though lately I’ve started talking to people outside of the PM discipline to understand how they work, how they perceive the PM role, etc). Whenever I come across a good idea, I put it on a Trello board:

Trello board for Writing. If you find a topic in here that’s interesting, please feel free to write about it. I can help out too!

As the week goes on, I’ll add more thoughts and points to each card. If a card has enough meat to start the writing process, I’ll move it to the “Ideated” column.

There are a lot of things in an ideated item. Links, thoughts that I have, a high-level structure, etc are considered sufficient to write about the topic.

I never aim to create the perfect structure — in fact, most of the time, I have 2–3 links to support or disprove my theory, a high-level structure that is seldom followed.

From a timeline perspective, I have Sunday to Thursday to think about topics. On Thursday evening, a few hours before going to bed, I go through the topics that are ideated and pick one up for framing in my mind. If there are links, I’ll read/hear them again. I write on Fridays (as it is a holiday here in the UAE)

Tip: Use the Trello app. Have a Tasker process to open Trello when you want to share the article/audio log with Trello to store it. Trust me — the biggest detractor and the biggest promotor to writing is technology. Use it well.

Writing

My writing is time-boxed to 4 hours. In 4 hours, I’ve to write, edit, design & publish. Usually, since I have most of the ideas in my head over the week, I’ll complete the writing in an hour. This is followed by editing for around an hour or so, identifying areas where I’ll need designs to assist with the text. An hour on Figma completes the designs. The last hour is spent on playing the devil’s advocate — asking questions like, can I simplify this further? Can I add an anecdote there to drive home the point? Once that is done, I’ll push the entire content into Grammarly. Using markdown helps as it preserves formatting and links.

Once the grammar check is completed, the writing process is complete.

Side note: I adopt a drunken monkey style to writing — float about endlessly adding thought to the article till I’m faced with the time crunch or I’m out of things to write. Once that’s done, the wiser, saner side of me takes over, rigorously cutting out pieces that do not support the main piece of the content. This happens in Ulysses. Once that is done, I explore Figma for new color combinations and font options. I find inspiration and add the right content. This works for me. Your mileage may vary.

Publishing

Thanks to Ulysses, I can auto-magically publish the content to Medium and Wordpress (where my website is…). The article is first published to Medium, where I add images and do the final bits of formatting & calling to attention different parts. Once the article is complete, I copy it back into Ulysses — updating the tags and changes. From there, it is a straight shot into Wordpress — updating the article to meet a specific SEO score in Rank Math (I aim for > 80).

From Wordpress, I take the published link and add it to Medium as a canonical link.

Tips

I’ve learned the following things from my writing:

1. You’ll hate your first few articles. That’s ok. You’re adopting an agile mindset. Remember, the first iPhone had a shitty experience by today’s standards — but it solved a specific pain point. Only through iteration can you get better.
2. Do not copy others’ writing flows. Use them as guides — you may not need fancy technology crutches. I didn’t buy the Ulysses app till I was sure it brought about some improvement in my process. Your challenges might warrant a different writing application.
3. Be consistent. It is hard. Sometimes you don’t have a lot to talk about. That’s alright. You can post a 300-word article. Posting is more important than quality. You don’t have an audience of 1000s of folks. And they’ll be forgiving.
4. You don’t have to have original thoughts all the time. Original content is hard to come by… but the only way you can reach original content is by standing on the shoulders of giants. You can always have your take, summarize concepts or visualize complexities that others have discovered. Deep thought and metacognition are developed only through these means.
5. There are critics, fans & experts. You can’t please them all.
6. Find a niche and stick to it. Occasionally wander to different areas, but come back to your niche.

Thank you for reading!