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.

I Am Testing Silva Meditation Method To Work Less And Produce More

Neera

On a Monday morning, just three weeks ago, the universe responded to my pleas for a way out from all the stress and overwhelm associated with online writing.

I was watching Tim Urban’s TED Talk when a sponsored video interrupted it. Normally, I would quickly click ‘Skip Ad’ and get back to the video, but this time I kept listening because the story was very interesting.

I watched the video for 23 minutes and bought the course the speaker was selling. Then I watched two more videos, by the same speaker, and bought another course and membership to the community.

For three weeks, I have been learning and testing the concepts and meditation exercises taught by the course. My stress is gone, my productivity has quadrupled and my future looks brighter than ever.

Before I go any further with the benefits, I am observing I want to share with you Jose Silva’s story I heard in the sponsored video three weeks ago.

In the early 40s, a guy by the name of José Silva, developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children’s IQ. He had ten children and like any parent he wanted them to do well.

José Silva was an electrician in the US Army. Once, while going through a routine army mental health checkup, he noticed a psychologist was assigned to ask all army recruits a series of questions. It was just a routine thing, but he grew fascinated and started reading more and more books on psychology.

As an electrician, he knew if a wire has more resistance less electricity flows through it but if you reduce its resistance, more electricity can flow through it.

Jose wondered if the same principle would apply to the brain.

What if we could reduce the resistance in the brain, can our brains operate more efficiently?

It was the early 60s, and scientists had come up with the theory that there were four levels of brain frequency — beta, the waking state; alpha the more relaxed or slightly sleepy state, theta when dreams and vivid imagery occur and delta the slowest brain wave frequency when healing and regeneration occur.

Jose wondered whether moving into the alpha or theta level was the way of reducing resistance.

He started experimenting with his daughter.

He developed a script to take his daughter to a relaxed state. His script was something like guided meditation except back in the 60s, the word guided meditation didn’t exist.

So, Jose Silva would put his kids into a guided meditation and then read her important elements from their school textbooks. He found she could remember better when she was in this alpha or slightly relaxed level of mind with her eyes closed and when he would ask her questions and she could recall better.

It is a well-known fact today that you can remember and retrieve information faster in the alpha level of mind.

Then something curious happened.

His daughter would answer him while he was still formulating a question in his mind. She somehow knew the question he was going to ask her even before he could verbally speak it.

He was a devout Christian. He couldn’t figure out how his daughter could so-called read his mind. So he wrote to Joseph Banks Rhine, of Duke University. JB Rhine was the famous doctor who pioneered research in extrasensory perception and formed parapsychology as a branch of psychology.

He told JB Ryan he had figured out a way to train children to be intuitive. JB Ryan dismissed it. He said, your daughter was probably intuitive, to begin with.

Jose Silva disagreed. So he then trained all the kids to be intuitive.

Then he trained all the neighbor’s kids. The neighbor got fascinated. Their kid’s grades were going up. What’s this man doing with them? So they asked Jose if he can teach them as well. So Jose started teaching little classes in Laredo, Texas.

Jose found it wasn’t just intuition that went up with his technique, but people’s pain disappeared and their happiness levels went up. One person had migraines for a long time and after learning from Jose Silva his migraine disappeared. He wrote about it in the local newspaper and his next class was completely swamped.

The Silva Method was born.

A path to reducing mental resistance? He called it a centering exercise.

It spread across America through the 70s and 80s. Soon it was being used by the Chicago White Sox, and famous celebrities of the time, like opera singer Margarita Piazza. The New York Times and The Washington Post featured articles on the Silva Method. Jose Silva wrote a book, The Silva Mind Control Method which sold well over a million copies.

And the Silva method, as it spread globally, ended up graduating some 10 million students over three to four decades.

But the story doesn’t end there.

A Weird Coincidence

There was a point in Jose’s research when he almost gave it up.

Jose Silva was finding his work very fulfilling, but it wasn’t making him any money. To feed his large family, he knew he had to give it up and go back to just running his electrical business. One night, as he tells in his biography, he grew so frustrated, he flung his psychology book across the room and went to sleep, promising himself that he would never dabble in this again because he needed to earn a living.

That night, he had a weird dream. He saw a figure of Mother Mary who gave him a four-digit number.

He wondered, what is this four-digit number? And the first thought was it must be the license plate number of a car, and he needed to meet the person who owns that car.

So Jose Silva decided to keep his mind open for any car with a four-digit number. As he was going to his radio repair business, a friend came to him and said, “Jose, I’m about to swing across the border to Mexico to pick up some goods. You want to come with me?” Jose said, “Sure.” It was not a busy day and Jose saw no harm in accompanying his friend across the border.

So they got into the car and drove across the border to Mexico. And as they were driving across the border to Mexico, Jose told his friend about the four-digit number and the dream. They went to a shop to buy goods in Mexico. And as Jose was picking up his goods, his friend called him over and his friend said, “Jose, look, they’re selling a lottery ticket here. Isn’t this the number that came into your dream?” And it was.

Jose bought the lottery ticket, and he ended up winning $10,000. That money allowed him to keep doing his research.

Jose wrote, look at the weirdness that happened. It wasn’t just a dream. His mind didn’t just give him a number, it showed him an image to reinforce that it was coming from a higher power. It then caused synchronicity to happen when a friend came to invite him to Mexico because the winning lottery number wasn’t on the US side. It was on the Mexican side.

Another coincidence happened when his friend saw the lottery number while he thought it was a car license plate number. All of these strung together were like a ripple of reality to give him the cash infusion needed to take the Silva method forward. It was then he realized he was on to something.

I have been going through a 28-day program and recording my progress in a journal after each day.

I have gone through many self-development programs, but never I have seen so much growth in so little time.

I am meditating three times a day, five to fifteen minutes for each instance. It is not the normal relaxation kind of meditation I was familiar with. Instead, it is an active meditation designed to help turn problems into projects.

How I Become A Teacher After Vowing Never To Become One

Neera

When I was a young girl, I declared to my mother, “I will never become a teacher.”

My mother, with all her wisdom, said to me, “Never say never.”

Both my parents were teachers. Our household had the same routine year after year. Start of the year, mid-term exams, summer vacations, second-term exams, and then final exams.

The most exciting thing to happen in a year was for my parents to receive bundles of final exam papers to mark.

My parents would stay up late at night marking those papers. Then the absolute finale — to seal the bundles with molten wax and take them to the post office.

While other children’s parents talked about their exciting jobs. My parents talked about their students and their achievements.

It never bothered them they were not earning much. And their talent, dedication, and hard work went unrecognized, undervalued, and underpaid.

They were proud their students were doing well, and they played a role in helping them get there.

When I grew up, I wanted to be like the parents of my friends. I wanted to be applauded for the organization I worked for. The kind of work I did, and the amount of money I earned.

So, I did a Master’s in Biochemistry and became a scientist. Then, I studied software engineering and became a computer programmer. I worked in the corporate sector and in public service. I became a manager and then a director.

I became all I ever wanted to be. And received plenty of recognition, praise, and remuneration for my achievements.

But then, in the third act of my life, my mother’s prophecy came true.

I started teaching aspiring writers how to write, first through my articles, then through my courses.

And it was then I had the revelation – there is nothing more satisfying than teaching someone a skill that you have mastered.

Nothing has fulfilled me more than seeing my students doing well, taking part in a writing challenge or building a daily writing habit, or becoming a fluent writer, or writing a book in 30 days.

Now, in the third act of my life, I have become like my parents. A proud teacher, marveling at my students’ achievements.