Choose your painful day
And you’ll never work a day in your life.
It’s a splendid feeling to have one written post in the hopper before starting a draft. To do it, you must choose your painful day.
Your painful day is where you write as if you’re publishing, but your true deadline is at least five days hence. Fake deadline, real energy.
They say six is the magic number. If you can sit and write for six minutes, you’ll easily make twenty. By thirty, you’re officially in Flow and are twice as likely to make it to an hour. None of this is scientific. I made these numbers up. Just sit down and write.
Stack your sentences. Declare your ideas, roughly in order, in language you don’t hate. When you’ve had enough, take a break. Go get a snack (not dairy), and return with a cleaver. Murder your first born ideas. Slash the fat. Get it to 99.9% publishable.
Now the painful part: immediately start another draft. Your goal is 30% publishable. Just make it edible. Persist for at least an hour.
Congratulate yourself. You have made one publish-ready piece and have another ready to edit.
The point of all this is to separate drafting from editing. These are distinct roles that require different mindsets. You are capable of both roles, but not in the same sitting, and not well when a deadline looms.
You never get to avoid the pain of writing, but you do get to choose where it goes. And if you dare to make every day the painful day, you might start to enjoy it. Because it is chosen.