Breaking the 20,000 Word Barrier Using Time-Blocking and the iOS 17 Calendar App
I’m effective at creating short form writing up to about 3,000 words (e.g. content for Medium). When I have an idea for an article, I blitz it, outlining, drafting, illustrating, and editing it over three days. Boom.
When I started working on larger projects, such as writing an eBook, I immediately discovered that the approach wasn’t going to work. At least, not in isolation.
A blitz works for a well-defined topic up to a certain size. It relies on me having all the pieces of the jigsaw in my head and not having to think about what’s next.
With large projects, you have to work on multiple levels, and it feels like spinning plates. Even a single chapter, if you’re writing a book, will probably need more than one blitz project.
Clearly, no one would be able to do all that work in one sitting. It’s easy to think that you’ll just somehow do it all over time, but life gets in the way. You have to consciously schedule work to get it done.
One approach is to break your time up into blocks and allocate work to each block. It forces you to consciously commit to work. If you don’t find yourself making hard choices about your priorities, you’re doing it wrong.
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