I Am Not Busy Anymore, I Am Fully Optimized

Neera

The word we chose determines how we feel.

Recently I learned how much power ‘words’ have on us.

The words not only have meaning but also emotions attached to them.

Lately, I have been using the word ‘busy,’ a lot.

‘Busy’ is a word with negative connotations. It’s a word I associate with drowning in work. I literally feel suffocated.

So, when I say ‘I am busy,’ I feel anxious, overwhelmed, and heading towards burnout.

So I replaced it with ‘fully optimized.’ The next time someone asked me how my day was going, I said, ‘Couldn’t be better. I am fully optimized.’

It instantly felt better. It generated a different emotional reaction. I felt in control and on top of things.

Think about the words in your life that might restrict you. Find a replacement word for them and watch the magic happen.

I Got Rid Of Overwhelm Virus For Good, With A Simple Remedy

Neera

When I quit working back in 2019, I thought I will have all the time in the world, now that I don’t have to commute to work, and spend most of my waking hours doing meaningless things that others want me to do.

I thought I would wake up leisurely each morning, go over the newspaper over a cup of tea, spend a couple of hours writing, then go out to visit a gallery or meet a friend, before heading home for a long, interesting evening.

Instead, I was chasing my tail all day, doing things I never thought I would have to do. Things such as writing articles, social media posts, newsletters, doing marketing, web calls, seminars, and webinars.

I had contracted the overwhelmed virus.

The virus incapacitated me for years. I kept soldiered on. I reduced the number of articles I published each week to just one. I made them smaller. I stopped writing on my website and concentrated just on Medium. I ignored Facebook and LinkedIn completely. I still couldn’t manage.

I was about to quit, but before that, I gave writing one last shot.

What I did might sound contradictory, but I set myself a challenge to write 100 articles in 100 days.

From 13 April, 2021 to 21 July, 2021, I wrote 100 articles without missing a day. How did I do that when I was finding it hard to write even one article a week?

You might think the answer lies in increased ability, yet that’s not it. I didn’t suddenly become more talented in those days.

You might suggest I somehow had more time to write, but it wasn’t even that. During those months, I wrote and published my first book.

So, how did I do it?

I stopped fretting and kept ploughing ahead.

Writing and publishing an article day becomes a task just like cooking or doing dishes.

As soon as I stop writing (and publishing) every day, writing becomes difficult again.

Prior to 100 articles, I had taken part in NaNoWriMo several times and I knew if I could meet the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, I can write an article a day.

Surprisingly, I don’t get overwhelmed when I am participating in a writing challenge or publishing an article a day.

That overwhelm comes from less, not more.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been part of a 30-day challenge, but a simple challenge like that can solve your problem of overwhelm forever.

Then I have another ace up my sleeve, and it’s called “planning”.

When faced with writing 7 articles in a week, you can’t just sit down and write each day. Your brain is fried with the thought of having to create such a high volume of work on a constant basis. The only way forward is to sit down and work out a plan. And that’s precisely what I do.

Without the plan, I would be soon flounder. To get those articles out day after day without fail, the only lifesaver is a plan.

Time and time again, the people who are overwhelmed will almost always not have a plan. When you know you have to write something every day, you will read online magazines, or go to the library and come back with an armload of books, you will keep your eyes and ears open for stories.

You will make notes, collect headline, have draft articles ready for the next day. You are ready. Just like you stock your fridge and pantry for the week to cook every night, you stock your draft folder with draft articles for the week.

If you go back to the root of overwhelm, you will almost always find a lack of planning.

Once you get down to planning, you realize it’s a bit like being on the road.

You may have the plan to get to your destination, but things have changed since you got into your car. There might be too much traffic, or an accident up ahead. Every lousy driver seems to have shown up on the road at the exact point you started on your journey.

When we start a project, we realise things change and our plans have to change too. That’s fine. Yet planning helps.

They say plans are worthless, but planning is priceless.

It is during planning that we are prepping our mind for the task ahead. And most of the time the only thing standing between us and our goal is our ‘mind.’

Usually, it takes much less time to do a task when we ‘feel’ like it. But when we don’t, a simple task feels like a mammoth.

There are ways to trick our ‘mind.’ If you can make the task a routine, the mind allocates the task to the ‘autopilot.’

Autopilot is the subconscious part of the brain that takes care of all routine mundane activities, such as brushing our teeth, washing the dishes, turning the TV at news time.

When article writing become a routine, subconscious mind takes over and it keeps working on it all day in the background.

Most people who get things done have similar routines

They first set a plan in place, and then turn it into a routine.

The people who are overwhelmed never have a plan, and hence no routine either.

Check out the busiest, most productive people you know and they’ll have plans and routines. Find someone who is overwhelmed all the time, and they’ll tell you they have plans and routines, but they often have none. They complain they have no time to plan. Well, there you go — it’s all downhill from thereon.

A plan needs to exist, or nothing happens.

Planning also stops us from taking on too much.

When your day is already filled with drawing lessons, writing articles, and learning software you really should master — you know that you’ve got enough on your plate. Without the plan in place, it seems you can slot in more stuff.

I plan my year, my months, and then my weeks. But I don’t plan my days. My days have routines. Even then I keep most of my days flexible so that I can handle emergencies and make room for spontaneity.

To get off the overwhelm bandwagon, you first have to work out a plan.

Then the plan has to become a routine. But that’s just the starting point. It doesn’t help if you take ages to get something done.

Productive people also have another superpower. That power is called fluency. Fluency is the ability to do a task quickly and effortlessly.

Look at all the work you’re doing, and you can be sure you’re wasting massive amounts of time.

Let’s take the simple act of finding interesting images for your articles. Do you do that each time you write an article, or you set aside half an hour in a week and download a bunch of free images to use in your articles?

The difference between people who get a lot done vs those that struggle is merely the lack of fluency.

We fail to create such shortcuts because of course, we’re busy. We fail to implement new features because we have a life. But it’s all a lack of fluency, and it leads to a drain of energy.

Once your energy is drained, you’ve heading towards a state of overwhelm.

You can get a high-quality article done in 90 minutes flat or sweat over it for days on end.

People who are overwhelmed take the longer route

The way to get away from that overwhelming feeling is to ask yourself: How can I do the task in ‘x’ minutes?

Or x. hours?

It is not as hard as you believe. In reality, most of us can reduce the number of hours we spend on writing quite dramatically.

What the word ‘overwhelm’ suggests is that we have lost control.

The word ‘overwhelm used to give me negative feelings. I have eliminated it from my dictionary and replaced it with ‘fully optimized.’

Now, when I feel I am losing control, I don’t think ‘overwhelm’ I think of re-prioritizing. It changes my perspective. I don’t get negative feeling about the situation I am in. Rather, I feel energized to review and realign my priorities.

If you use the word overwhelm, that alone will kill you. The way out of overwhelm is not exactly easy, but it starts with a word change.

‘Optimized’, or ‘Re-prioritize’ are good start. Once you have replaced the word, you can start working on achieving fluency.

Takeaway

Anyone can get to where he or she wants to be and do it without feeling overwhelmed.

It’s a combination of several elements, but in the end, those who are able to meet the source of their overwhelm head-on and become fluent at it, can be free of the virus forever.

I Deconstructed 100 Of Tim Denning’s Articles And This Is What I learned

Neera

I have figured out how Tim Denning is writing ten articles a week and why readers love reading them.

Ever since I started writing on Medium in 2020, Tim Denning has been consistently generating ten articles a week. When many top writers gave up on the platform and started looking elsewhere, he kept showing up, hardly discouraged by what was happening around him.

You got to give him credit for that.

No wonder he has 305,000 followers on Medium and close to half a million on LinkedIn.

When I was new to Medium, I was in awe of his ability to consistently churn so many articles. At that time, he was working full-time and was also running courses and writing ebooks. I thought he had an inborn talent for writing to be so productive. Mind you, in those days it used to take me 7 to 8 hours to write one article.

As I get to know him a bit better, I learned he was a normal young man with steely determination.

As I am using his strategy to write five articles in a day, this week I sat down and read over a hundred of his articles in a single sitting and deconstructed them.

With little ado, here is what I found.

Writing articles in batches is a better strategy than writing an article a day.

As Tim has told us multiple times that he writes articles only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He writes and schedules 5 articles on each of these days. I used to think it is beyond anyone’s ability (except Tim) to do that. But as I started doing it myself, I found it is in fact easier to write five articles in a day than to write one a day.

The reasons are:

  • You are laser-focused (Tim calls it being in the flow state).
  • You know you have roughly 60 to 90 minutes per article, so you don’t waste time.
  • You can do images and footers for all articles in 5 -10 minutes.
  • You can use parts of the material in multiple articles.
  • You can choose one topic (say productivity) and write five articles in one go. The next day, you can choose another topic and write another five articles.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is the way to write better.

Most of Tim’s article flows so well as if he is just sitting opposite you and talking to you. You can call it mastery or you can call it stream-of-consciousness writing (or free writing).

Stream-of-consciousness writing happens when you don’t have to think and you just keep on writing as it comes. And usually, it is quick, fluent, and much more engaging.

When you have written as many articles as Tim has, most of your ideas are already clear in your head. You remember your stories so well that they pour out of your fingers at the right place, at the right time.

I am writing this article as stream-of-consciousness writing. I have not outlined this article. I am not sure what I am going to write in the following paragraphs. But I trust the right thoughts will keep coming until there are no more and then the article will be done.

Most of his articles are Leggo blocks put together.

There are so many structures and templates to write good and balanced articles. But I am mesmerized by Tim’s structure. He writes in blocks and then seamlessly puts them together as coherent articles.

There is an advantage in writing in blocks. You can pre-write them. I know Tim uses Roam Research to take notes. Roam Research allows you to take notes in the dot-point format only. Tim skillfully uses the notes he collects in his articles. Some of them he reuses multiple times, but you won’t even notice because it fits within the context.

Block format is also good for embedding stories. For example, he tells the following story in the middle of an article:

Author Ryan Holiday told the story of buying the book “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius at age 19.

There was an option at the time to get the book for free online. Ryan chose to pay for a copy and get a decent translation of it in modern English.

The decision seemed tiny.

But years later, he became obsessed with stoicism thanks to this $20 investment.

Now he’s built a multi-million-dollar career out of stoicism.

He has already told two stories before this one and then there is one more in the last third of the article.

Isn’t that cool?

Stories make the articles interesting. And they also make the articles less dense, giving the readers breathing space.

He spends more time on the headings than on the body of the articles.

His headings are brilliant. They are not the clickbaity. They are not even the ones with the highest score on the heading analyzers (I don’t know whether he runs them past an analyzer or not).

Instead, his headings are long and reader-centric. He has many bases on personal stories and lessons learned from them.

Here, have a look at a few of them:

The #1 Way to Succeed as an Online Writer Is to Stop Playing It Safe

Never Underestimate Someone Who Practices Self-Education in Their Free Time

The (Realistic) Way to Go from $0 to 7-Figures Online in 365 Days

Today I Lost $6000 on a Rogue Accountant. Here’s How *Not* to Get Screwed by Strangers.

Workplace Principles I Know at 36, I Wish I Had Known at 21

He has an ambition and a drive to become world-class in at least one thing.

None of the above things would have worked had he not had the ambition and the discipline to become a world-class player.

At age 12, he decided that he wanted to be world-class at one thing.

He chose drumming. He went all in for that and found a teacher drummer who trained him as if he’d become a navy seal.

Learning from him put me in a constant state of overwhelm.

As he grew up, Tim grew out of drumming. But he didn’t forget his trainer’s weird way of training him. When he chose to write as his vocation, he applied everything he learned as a drummer to writing.

Today he is in the top 1% of writers in the world.

Without that ambition and discipline, he wouldn’t have been able to be a world-class writer in less than 8 years.

Closing Remark

It took me 57 minutes to write this article, along with pulling out quotes and links, 10 minutes to edit it and 3 minutes to select an image and add a footer.

I have not reached the state of writing and scheduling 5 articles in one day yet, but I am sure if I continue at it, I will be able to, with a few weeks of practice.

I may not have Tim’s trainer to coach me, but I have six decades of life experience to draw from. If I am able to write and schedule 5 article in a day, it will be a great achievement for me.

Thank you, Tim, for giving me something to strive for.

Are Our Reading Habits Scr*wed Forever

Neera

Before smartphones and before the internet, I used to read newspapers, magazines, and novels. Now it has been more than a decade since I have read a newspaper. I stopped buying magazines ages ago and I have to force myself to finish the novel even if it is well-recommended and I am enjoying it.

Instead, I spend hours on LinkedIn, Medium, blogs, and countless newsletters I subscribe to. I have tried to get away from it all and get back to some serious reading but failed. Serious reading bores me now. I want a fast-paced bite-size reading I can do in between chores and my own writing commitments.

Hamish Mckenzie, cofounder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack wrote an article, Time To Read, in which he admitted, “If I picked up a book instead of reflexively opening Twitter every couple of hours, I’m sure I would have read through my way through a library in the last 10 years.”

Social media is conspiring against our better instincts. It wants to feed us continuous dopamine hits and we keep accepting its offer.

The economic model for supporting content on the internet sucks. It doesn’t put readers first. The readers are addicted to Twitter and TikTok because these companies are zeroing in on the most titillating content to keep readers in a perpetual state of not-quite-satisfied-but-close. Social media companies are serving advertisers, not the readers.

For hundreds of years, publishing giants, newspapers, and magazines were making money through advertisements. But the internet vaporized that model. The new publishing giants, the social media companies, have a new model — ad-overload.

In all this mayhem, the writers were forgotten. They didn’t have the security of an agency behind them. They are not only expected to write for free but to continuously produce an unbelievable amount of content.

Medium came up with the concept of a Paywall

Medium.com was one of the first publishing companies to come up with a plan to pay writers for their work. They introduced a Paywall. They charged readers a monthly subscription fee and paid writers a portion of that based on the number of views and clicks.

The model became so successful that millions of readers and thousands of writers flocked to the platform. They ranged from amateurs to experts, all writing being able to find readers. But after enjoying an unbelievable amount of success for 3 to 4 years, Medium.com started on a downward spiral. There were several reasons for that and one of them being Medium started concentrating on readers (from where the revenue was coming) and ignored the writers (who were doing the hard yards to make Medium a success).

Thankfully things are beginning to change in mid-2022. The new CEO, Tony Stubblebine, is trying to turn the ship. While Medium was on a downward spiral, a new model emerged, introduced by Substack.

Substack model is different

Substack didn’t pay the writers as Medium did, but it allowed them to charge their readers directly. Writers could send their work directly to readers’ inboxes and charge whatever they thought it was worth. Substack made it possible and took a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue generated by the writers on the platform.

Substack can succeed only when writers succeed.

It’s a better model because one of the better ways an internet publishing company can provide value is by helping writers find more readers and make more money. And the best way to do that is to make sure readers are happy. Doing the right thing for the writer means doing the best thing for readers.

The way Substack is providing a great reading experience is:

  • by providing clean, simple, fast-to-load posts
  • no Ads
  • no pop-ups
  • directly in the inbox
  • option to read in the App
  • growth within the platform.

On Substack, readers have a closer relationship with the writer they care about. And writers have the ability and space to go deep into the issues that really matter to them.

A writer’s primary loyalty is to readers, and they get rewarded for using their attention wisely. They don’t have to play a game with an algorithm or trick readers into clicking like they had to with Medium. They are independent and not at the mercy of a company.

If they disappoint readers, the readers have the power to unsubscribe with just a click.

Readers don’t subscribers to newsletters

They subscribe to writers.

They want to know what their favorite writer’s thoughts are on a range of topics, what their experiences and learnings are, and what their life is like.

I subscribe to several newsletters, but in fact, I subscribe to the writers.

I want to read what they are saying. When I am reading a writer’s post, it’s just me and the words. I bury myself in the writer’s thoughts and eloquence and ideas.

The future of online writing will be different

The first thirty years of the internet were built on the mistaken business assumption that online reading isn’t worth as much physical reading. So they focused on clickbait or social flotsam and jetsam.

But the internet is still just getting started, and so is Substack. The way we’ve thought about online writing and reading for these first 30 years won’t be true for the next 30.

Big things are still to come. Writers will have the power their work directly with their readers.

And the readers will have the power to choose which writers they want to read.

Lack Of Energy, Not Time, Causes Writers To Stall And Crash

Neera

One of the biggest hurdles of writing has nothing to do with writing at all.

It has nothing to do with time, either.

Instead, it is a lack of understanding of how energy works.

As I have set myself a challenge to write 27 articles in 20 days and came up with a genius plan, to write five articles a day, three days a week, I am finding I am running out of energy much before I am running out of time.

I would start strong. I would open five documents, and start working on them, and before I know it, several hours have passed, and I have achieved nothing.

I would be on the computer, mind you, for all this time — reading, researching, writing, rewriting, working on headlines, and creating sub-heading. After all this intense work, my eyes would get tired. Soon after, my brain would refuse to concentrate and I know I was functioning on the reserve battery and would soon crash.

There is a way around this hurdle.

Understanding my energy pattern.

Energy isn’t something we think about while writing. Instead, we worry about the content and the time we have to write it. However, energy is the main reason we get stuck.

Energy is not about being a superhero and continuing till the work is done. Despite some super willpower, you can still run out of energy on a consistent basis.

We run out of energy because:

  1. Lack of pre-work
  2. The scarcity of input
  3. Your energy levels

Lack of pre-work

Pre-work is all the things we do even before we start writing. Writing is a several-step process. You got to select a topic; outline it, and do whatever research needs to be done before you can start writing.

Sometimes we get stalled because we don’t have enough information. That leads us to the next point.

The scarcity of input

You got to give time between selecting a topic and letting the brain come up with ideas to write about the topic. When you choose a topic, give it a loose outline and leave it for a few days, subconsciously, your brain is looking for ways to present an argument.

Your brain is looking for connections between whatever you read and whatever is already stored in your mind. By giving it time, you come back with a unique angle on the topic. This is when you will feel energized to write about the topic.

Your energy levels

Your energy levels are not the same during the day. For some people, their energy is at its peak in the morning and as the day progress, their energy depletes. For these people, writing an article after dinner is a bad idea.

I am one of these people. Invariably I leave the article writing too late in the evening and then pay the price for it.

On better days, my strategy is to select a few topics, preferably five, create five documents, and outline five articles. Then next day, do whatever research is required for those topics. On day three, I start writing them one by one, preferably in the morning and definitely before dinner. After dinner, I do tasks that require low energy. Tasks such as selecting an image, adding a footer, and a CTA (call-to-action).

If I can’t finish an article, because it is too late at night and I am running on reserve, rather than pushing through it, I leave it till morning. Sometimes it takes me just ten or fifteen minutes to finish and publish the article.

Takeaway

Rather than managing your time, manage your energy.

Identify your peak, medium, and low energy times of the day.

Identify which tasks need low, medium, or high energy and do them at

Plan your topics in advance.

Spread the writing tasks over several days.

Get the outline done.

Make sure your research is stored away, ready to use.

Finally, write the article.

Edit it on another day.

See what can you outsource.

I Am Planning To End 2022 On A High

Neera

At the start of 2022, I set a goal for myself — I will write two articles a week on Medium.

I thought that was the minimum I should do, as I had several other writing commitments.

That was just 104 articles and in the previous year, I had written and published 100 articles in 100 days, without missing a beat.

I was going fine for the first five months of the year, and then the travel started. Since Medium had taken away the functionality, to write from mobile devices, I lost the continuity.

Instead, I started publishing my travel stories on LinkedIn.

One thing led to another, and I kept missing my goal.

In December, I usually go back to my annual goals and see how I went against them. I was horrified to find out that I was falling behind on many of them.

Here were my goals:

  • 300+ LinkedIn posts
  • 104 Medium articles
  • 52 The Whimsical Writer Newsletter issues
  • 17 Behind The Scenes issues for paid subscribers of the newsletter
  • 3 Books
  • 3 Mini-guides

Now when the time came to report on my end-of-year progress I found although I was on target with the LinkedIn posts and Newsletter issues, I was behind with the Medium articles, books, and Mini-guides.

Here is where I stand:

I had written only 67 articles in the whole year and was short by 27 articles.

I had written two mini-guides and still needed to write one

And although I had finished writing three books, I still needed to edit two of them.

Dilemma

Now, I can be lenient with myself and let go of these goals, promising myself that I will do better next year.

But then I will do the same next year.

But, if I meet my goals this year, it is likely I will meet them next year too.

Decision

So I decided, in the remaining month of December I am going to write

  • 27 articles on Medium
  • Editing two books
  • Write a mini-guide and of course
  • Write 5 newsletter issues for the month.

So here I am, ending the year on a high.

I have found when I set myself unusually high goals, I tend to find ways to meet them.

Yesterday I sat down and drafted five articles. I published one and scheduled the other four.

I learned it takes the same amount of time to write five articles as it takes to write one. In fact, over time, it becomes easier to write 5 articles in a day, because you have trained your brain to do so.

You are more focused, you waste less time on how to say things and your writing flows effortlessly.

Also, if you pick one topic and write 5 articles on it, you write faster and write much better articles than picking five different topics.

For example, if you make a schedule:

  • Monday: 5 articles on productivity
  • Wednesday: 5 articles on writing
  • Friday: 5 articles on travel.

You will have 15 articles done in a week. You also will give yourself breaks and do other things in between and start again next week with different topics.

If I were successful, I would have found a way to overcome one of my biggest challenges of the year — how to write content fast and regularly. This exercise might turn out as the best learning of 2022.

I must add I wouldn’t have dared to set this goal, had I not been practicing Silva Meditation techniques which have enabled me to turn problems into projects.

I will write more about Silva techniques in my future articles. Keep an eye out for them.