How to Overcome Writer’s Block to Improve Your Productivity

Writer's Block

 Writer's Block

Writer’s block is the curse of all writers, whether writing online or offline.  Even the great novelists report that at times they experienced writer’s block.  

In an earlier blog post, I offered suggestions on how to achieve your daily blogging goal.  That blog post on daily blogging focused mainly on creating productive habits and establishing a routine. But what happens if, despite your routine, you are lost for words on a particular day when you want to write?  What if, despite your best efforts, no ideas come to mind? 

Well, there are a couple of strategies that I use that you might find useful to help you overcome writer’s block and improve your productivity. 

[Photo credit: Writer’s Block by orijinal

Strategies to Overcome Writer’s Block 

I have developed these strategies over time while writing both technical and popular articles and blog posts.  They have really helped me overcome writer’s block

1. Talk to the computer

This sounds a bit strange but it is a valuable technique.  I learned this approach from a colleague when we were doing an Australia-wide research project on action learning.  Whenever we got stuck for writing, he would go to the keyboard and start typing questions like:

  • What do I want to say here?
  • Who am I saying this to?
  • What’s the key message that I want to get across?
  • Why would I bother to write this?
  • What can the reader learn from what I am writing?

 He would then progressively start to answer these questions as if they were questions asked of him by the computer.  Invariably, we would have no trouble progressing once we responded to his questions on the computer. 

2. Record yourself – create a podcast 

Sometimes the act of writing is itself an impediment to what you want to say – you can’t find the right words to start.  What I have done to overcome this particular writer’s block is to use an audio recorder, my smartphone or a program like Audacity or AudioBoo to record what I want to say.  When you move to the auditory channel, your natural instincts to edit are turned off, so a natural speaking flow can occur.  You can then type from the audio and play around with the grammar and structure.  You could use the questions mentioned in (1) to get started.  It is amazing how using a different communication channel can free up your ideas (and overcome innate fears that can cause writer’s block). 

3. Speed writing 

This is a real challenge to the perfectionist who may suffer from fear of failure or fear of success.  It is a similar idea to the previous one but here you stick with writing as the primary task.  However, instead of concerning yourself with structure, grammar, spelling or complete sentences, you just write any idea that comes into your head about the topic that is the focus of your attention.  What you will find is that one idea will lead to another and you will find new ways to develop ideas mentioned earlier in your speed writing.  It takes a bit of work to edit the writing, but at least you will have captured the ideas and linkages – you just need to structure them and edit your expression. 

Speed writing can really free up writer’s block because it enables you to overcome your lifetime conditioning – having to proceed in a logical way and write perfect sentences. The speed writing approach stresses lateral thinking and randomness, and activates the right brain.  Eventually, you need to activate your left brain to impose some order on what you have written.  The speed writing process can really help you overcome writer’s block by tapping into a part of your brain (the right side) that you may not use on a regular basis (depending on your type of work).  

4. Record a reflection 

Yesterday I was lost for a topic, so I reflected on what helped me to become productive with my blogging.  This led to my extended post on the how you can use focus to improve productivity.  That blog post started out as some random ideas that I thought I could write 200 words on and it ended up as a 7 point article of more than 1,200 words.  So even if you are slow to start writing, the very act of starting can loosen up your mind and capture the connections that are already resident there.  In the case of the focus blog post, I ended up jotting down some key points that turned into the 7 reasons why focus helps to improve productivity. 

This current post came about because I was experiencing writer’s block and was reflecting on how I had overcome it in the past – hence the focus of the article. 

5. Don’t try for perfection every time 

It’s better to write something, however short, rather than nothing.  The more you write, the easier it gets. Not every blog post is going to be a ‘pillar article’.  So it’s worth persisting and settling for something that may be good but not great.  Action generates ideas and ideas build on each other. 

If you want to be productive with your blogging, you need to explore strategies to overcome writer’s block – hopefully, my strategies will prove fruitful for you too.

 

Sometimes You Have to Stop to Move Forward: A Montville Break

View from Montville

 View from Montville

Over the weekend, I spent two days in a cabin in Montville, a mountain village on the Blackall Range in Queensland, Australia.   It was great to take in the mountain air and the glorious vistas and to stroll through Montville village, an arts and craft centre that I featured in one of my Squidoo lenses.  

I had deliberately left my laptop behind on this trip and took a real break from computers, the Internet and work generally.  There are times when you need to stop to move forward – to slow the momentum of your body and your mind.

Improve your blogging productivity with a rest

Without rest and relaxation, you can become stale in what you are doing whether it is article writing, social media marketing or writing blog posts. 

With a break, you can return to your daily blogging with renewed energy, insight and enthusiasm.  A break can also improve your productivity through the energy renewal and new perspectives you gain.  Often you will find that the solution to your current issue or problem lies in front of you – you just need time out to see it.

 This is particularly true when you are engaged in running a small business offline.  The daily demands can mean that you are constantly ‘chasing your tail’.  Eventually, you can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’ – you are blind to the bigger picture because of reacting to small things. 

Stepping back, taking time out, is essential to develop a new perspective.  You could take a weekend away to refresh your mind.  The beauty of a place like Montville can be really invigorating.  

View from The Potter's Place Montville
View from The Potter's Place Montville

[display_podcast]

 

Time seems to stand still when you stop – minutes turn into hours and hours become days.  This is in stark contrast to when you are busy chasing deadlines. 

I was able to take heaps of photos on my Samsung Galaxy S11 Camera (8 Megapixels) on my Montville break and now I have these available for blog posts (see images in this post) and for creating videos via Animoto.

I was also able to identify ways that I could add more content to my personal productivity membership site:

  • Re-purpose articles I have written for Ezinearticles.com
  • Create a series on MP3’s on productivity and energy levels
  • Expand productivity tips from some of my Squidoo lenses
  • Develop a series of promotional videos for the membership site.

By taking a two day rest at Montville, I am now able to resume my blogging with improved productivity through an increase in energy, resources and ideas.

The Challenge of Daily Blogging and the Need for Improved Personal Productivity

3Cs of blogging

There are many things that work against you when you attempt to achieve daily blogging

However, the effort to maintain a daily blogging schedule is well worth it.  I noticed that since I have missed a few days of publishing Small Business Odyssey, the Alexa ranking has changed from 860,000 to 1,100,000 – in other words, my web traffic has dropped.

 Daily blogging enables you to build momentum both with your writing and your blog traffic. 

 Photo Credit: cambodia4kidsorg

Creating a related blog – How to be productive

Sometimes you may need an infusion of new ideas or a new perspective on your blogging.  This can come through creating a related blog and using a drip-feed automated process.

Over the past week I’ve been building another WordPress blog, a productivity membership site:

http://www.how-to-be-productive.com

 Whilst the membership site was pre-built in terms of its drip-feed content, I decided to develop audio content for the first 9 lessons via Audacity.  Again, once I gained momentum in creating these recordings, I found the task easy and enjoyable.  I was able to produce the audios (MP3’s) for the membership site on personal productivity  in two sittings – one involving three recordings, the other six.

The associated task of inserting the audios into blog posts was made so easy by the very clever, free software, podPress, discussed in an earlier post.

So while I was not writing and publishing on my Small Business Odyssey blog, I was developing and refining my productivity membership site hosted on a WordPress blog. 

Personal productivity and daily blogging

 While the creation of the new productivity site may seem like a diversion from this blog, I believe that it actually reinforces the Small Business Odyssey blog.  Personal productivity underpins much of what I am writing about on Small Business Odyssey.  Fundamentally, if you can’t improve your personal productivity as a small business owner, you will have real difficulty engaging in any form of small business marketing.  Worse still, you may end up doing the wrong kind of work (e.g. wasting hours on Twitter, reading and writing Tweets).

One of the core challenges involved in daily blogging is, in fact, finding ways to improve your productivity. To make the time to achieve a daily, published blog post (a minimum of two hours taking into account locating images and editing), you need to find ways to improve your use of time. 

There are numerous things that can distract you or consume your time as a small business owner and it is easy to fall into old habits ( e.g. reading emails for hours) – with the net result that you do not make time for blogging.

Over the past three weeks, for example, I have been engaged with others in creating four tender submissions for our human resource consulting business. a mind-numbing task but essential for business survival and growth in the current economic and political climate.

It would have been very easy to give up daily blogging but I had to find a way to schedule my blog writing at a time when my productivity and creativity were at their best – early in the morning. 

To engage in daily blogging, takes a huge commitment but it is rewarding both intrinsically (personal satisfaction and sense of achievement) and extrinsically (increased web traffic and income).

 

Leverage Your Blogging: Create a Small Business Ezine

Mooloolaba rocks

Mooloolaba rocks

One of the easiest ways to leverage your blogging, is to create your own small business ezine.   An ezine is basically an email newsletter where you share articles, news and blog posts with members of your mailing list (customer list).  This approach to small business marketing serves multiple purposes and achieves leverage on a number of levels. 

Your regular small business ezine enables you to maintain contact with your customers, educate them about your products and services and offer free information and advice.  Most email service providers offer ways to further leverage your ezine via RSS feeds and automatic posts to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. 

If you are blogging regularly, you are creating the content for your ezine.  If you blog daily, you will be able to provide a small business ezine of considerable substance. 

How to use your blogging in your small business ezine

If you blog regularly, you can easily create an ezine from your blog posts.   Since I blog daily, I send a weekly ezine to my mailing list covering a number of posts around a theme, e.g. Squidoo or LinkedIn.  You need to decide the frequency of your small business ezine based on the regularity of your blog posts, the nature of your business and the kind of information you are offering.

Most autoresponders will replace the blog links in your email with their own generated links (if you specify that you want open rates and click-through-rates measured). 

Another option is to use the URL shortener bitly.com to shorten your blog links.  The advantages of this approach are that you can share each individual shortened link automatically with your Facebook and/or Twitter account and you can also get statistics on click-through-rates on the Bitly link.   It is a good idea to add a comment (like a status update) before you share your link on Bitly.

Blogging has lots of benefits, not the least of these is that it provides you with content to share with your mailing list via your small business ezine.

Blogging Hints: Sets and Sevens

a set of three ducks

a set of three ducks

 Blogging hints help you to establish and maintain your blogging frequency.  The idea of writing in ‘sets’ or ‘sevens’ is designed to help you build and maintain momentum.  Daily blogging, for example, is very much about gaining momentum.

The concept behind these two approaches is to plan ahead so that you can write a number of blog posts about the one topic area.   You decide in advance the sub-topics, so that you do not waste time trying to think up subjects for your blog posts when you should be writing.

Let’s have a quick look at both these approaches and see how they differ and what benefits accrue from using these blogging hints.

Blogging hint 1 :  Blogging in sets

The idea here is that you write a series of blog posts sequentially around a single theme.  So you identify in advance the sub-themes (or let them evolve as you write).   Then you write about each sub-theme in turn so you end up with a ‘set’ of blog posts covering a central theme.  The sub-themes could be any number but usually they range from three to six.

The benefits of the ‘sets’ blogging hint:

  • you can plan a series of blog posts in advance so that you can develop some momentum
  • you can make the most of your thinking and research around a particular topic and thus save time
  • you can create a critical mass of content around a theme which may result in higher search engine rankings for the relevant search terms
  • you can readily cross-reference to the related posts thus creating valuable internal links
  • you can provide your reader with digestible pieces of information about a topic (rather than trying to cover the sub-themes superficially in one single post)
  • you can write some posts in advance to assist you to maintain your daily blog publishing schedule
  • you can provide your mailing list with a coherent set of posts on a single theme.

An example of the ‘sets’ approach is my set of four (4) posts around the theme of ‘Webmaster Tools‘.

Blogging hint 2 :  Blogging in sevens

The concept in this blogging hint is that you first identify and write about seven (7) aspects of a single topic, e.g. the seven benefits of blogging daily, the seven reasons to have a blog, the seven ways to promote your blog.   The first blog post canvasses each of the seven aspects briefly to introduce the issues and to act as a ‘teaser’ to encourage the reader to explore further.  Then you write about each of the seven aspects in separate blog posts. 

This blogging hint requires sound knowledge about a topic area but it enables you to focus on each aspect in turn and to tease out more fully the implications of that aspect of the main theme of the blog posts.

 The benefits of the ‘sevens’ blogging hint:

  • the ‘sevens’ approach to blogging generates the same benefits as those listed for the ‘sets’ approach
  • you typically create more posts on a single theme (eight in total) than with the ‘sets’ approach
  • the individual blog posts are linked via the introductory post as this explains how they are related
  • readers tend to relate to things that involve the number ‘seven’ (some deep psychological reasons)
  • you have clarity at the start, as a writer, about the relationship each post has to the initial main post and this assists your writing.

These two blogging hints, ‘sets’ and ‘sevens’, have a lot in common in that they help you, as a writer, gain and sustain momentum in your blogging and make it easier to increase your blogging frequency.

[Photo credit: Thee Ducks by mape_s]