8 surprisingly simple tips to be a more efficient writer [Infographic]

Do you ever sit down to write and just stare at the screen, impatiently waiting for the content to appear? 

All the ideas are right there in your head. Why are the words not appearing? 

It is a frustrating feeling, to say the least.

As time passes through the day, your frustration begins to boil over and you have to find a way to disconnect because your head just isn’t there. 

Sound familiar? I think we have all been there. We convince ourselves that doing other things will help us refocus when really, we are using these distractions to stall time.

The world we live in today is filled with distractions. Your house, your phone, and even the computer you write on can bring distractions and make it challenging to focus.

For many of us, these distractions lead to procrastination which leads to inefficiency in writing. 

To help writers overcome these challenges, GrammarCheck compiled eight surprisingly simple tips that will make you a more efficient writer and visualized them into a helpful infographic featured at the bottom of this article. 

Here are the major themes I found.

Writer’s block vs talker’s block

To get started with writing efficiently, you have to find a space, physical or mental, that eliminates distractions. Writers who struggle with distractions can all struggle during different parts of the writing process.

If you are struggling to get started or to formulate your ideas, GrammarCheck recommends calling a friend or colleague that you can have a conversation with about your topic of choice.

Seth Godin said it best, “No one ever gets talker’s block… The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us... We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk.”

When you are “stuck” in writer’s block, the best way to break out is to talk through your ideas with someone else. 

Sharing your ideas in a conversation will make it much easier for you to formulate them. The conversation will likely start jumbled, but over time, the content will begin to align and your ideas will form.

Even a quick five-minute chat can get the cogs spinning in your head and boom, you are off to the races. 

Momentum is crucial

Once you have that breakthrough moment and those cogs start spinning, it is critical that you keep the momentum going. 

One of the best ways to keep that momentum is to just keep writing. 

Stopping to research every name, date, or statistic off the top of your head will slow you down and distract you from your writing.

Instead, leave fillers such as “Over XYZ# people used Instagram Advertising in 2019.” 

It is more important to get the content written and stay focused on the topic than to fill in the nitty-gritty details. 

By doing so, you will produce content quicker and it will be at a higher quality. 

Another tip for keeping your momentum when writing is to write down any relevant idea that comes to mind. 

If there is a side thought in your head, write it down somewhere on the page. 

While it may not seem totally relevant right now, it could be a crucial part of your content later on during the editing process.

Clean up the clutter... later

When it comes to editing, save it until you are done with your draft.

The constant switching between the creative and the critical side of your brain can slow down your efficiency heavily. 

Even if each switch costs you a 1/10th of a second, switching back and forth for each sentence can cost you up to 40% of your productive time. 

By disrupting that flow of creativity, you are wasting valuable writing time and will still be producing a less than perfect product. 

Instead, consider the way Sharon Hale imagined writing a draft.

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”

In order for you to create the masterpiece, you have to build up the foundation. If you don’t have all the necessary parts at your disposal, you will produce something that is incomplete. 

Efficient and Effective

Your content is one of the most valuable pieces of your organization’s marketing and sales strategies. As a content writer, you hold the key to your content’s success.

When thoughts of procrastination set in, come back to these tips and strategies to keep moving. 

For a full look at GrammarCheck’s eight surprisingly simple tips that will make you a more efficient writer, check out their infographic below: