Draft Now, Publish Later

Recently, I’ve been writing my blog posts in batches. To let you in on a little secret: this is the third blog post that I’m writing on April 30th. I didn’t write it today.

But I did polish it back up today. I write these blog posts in little batches because it’s more sustainable to write daily posts that way, but I don’t polish them. I write them in one shot, and then say good riddance until later.

Doing it this way has made writing daily blog posts a lot less stressful, since I know that I always have a backlog of possible posts to publish. If I get back late at night, I don’t have to come up with an idea for a post and write and publish it before the day is over.

I’ve found it much easier to write a post in two phases:

• Writing without needing to polish
• Polishing something that’s already written

Each step is much less intimidating than doing the whole process of writing one post, start to finish.

I can write a post without worrying about whether my writing is good because I just have to get something down. After I’ve finished writing it, I don’t have to even proofread. It’s easy to write a rough draft.

And then when I want to publish a post for the day, I go back and pick a draft and read it with fresh eyes. I’ll make some tweaks and then hit publish. That, too, is easier and less stressful: the writing is already there, I just have to edit it a bit.

By separating the writing and editing/publishing steps, I’ve made these daily blog posts a lot easier to keep up with. A little bit of daily-ness lost, but a lot of calmness gained.