Category Archives: Blogging

How I create so much content

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Between my two personal projects, I create a lot of content.

offlinemark:

  • Blog – Writing
  • Twitter – Shorter writing, writing meant to be seen more widely
  • Youtube – Educational content, screencasts
  • Podcast – Stories & lessons from my life, more personal

comfort (my music production project):

  • Music
  • Youtube – Educational content, screencasts on music production
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Podcast

I also have a travel blog that I don’t share publicly.

Some of these channels are more active than others, but I have three principles that help me do it all.

1 – Harvest, don’t generate

I try to harvest content from what I experience & learn in my life, rather than sit down, brainstorm, and generate content from nothing.

2 – Respect inspiration

I’m significantly more productive when I’m inspired, so I try to treat moments of inspiration with great respect and get to work when they come. Sometimes this means being awake at 5:18am writing (as I am now).

Rick Rubin talks about this exact concept in “The Creative Act”.

I try to avoid queueing things at all costs; if possible I just sit down and do it now.

3 – Have buckets for everything

Different kinds of ideas naturally have a medium in which they are best expressed. Insights or essays are best expressed in writing. Educational walkthroughs are best done via screencast. Stories are best told via audio.

I try to have “buckets” (media channels) ready to receive ideas in their best form the moment they strike. This helps you harvest as much of your creative potential as possible.

For a long time, I left content on the table by not having a podcast for offlinemark. I regularly had stories I thought of and wanted to share, but simply had no great place for them, so they weren’t shared. Now that I have the podcast, I notice that I fairly regularly have a thought that is suitable for that medium, and can capture it.

Bonus: 4 – Default to public, and iterate

Don’t get tied up polishing content before you publish it. Default to publishing whatever you have, and remember: You can always polish, expand, or re-release content later. Defaulting to in public maximizes the potential for it to be discovered.

Bonus (Dec 2023 ):

5 – Never let an idea slip

If you’re going to create a lot of content, step one is to not needlessly throw away good ideas when you have them. Ensure that you have some system or tools in place for quickly capturing ideas wherever you might have them. I heavily rely on “Hey Siri, remind me…” on my iPhone which lets me quickly record notes to process later. I use Omnifocus as my todo app which integrates with this. Omnifocus and most other todo apps have a “Quick Add” global keyboard shortcut which is useful if you’re already on your computer.

6 – Not all content needs to be long

Not all blog posts or content needs to be long and arduous to write. In fact, it’s better if it’s not.

7 – Minimize friction

My current blogging setup with WordPress feels very friction optimized — I just browse to my blog, click new post, write, and hit publish. No command lines. No writing in a separate app, then copying the post over. In-place construction if you will.

8 – One-shot it

Get in the habit of “one-shotting” content — forcing yourself to “finish” it in some way in the same session of work. It’s incredibly tempting to leave a piece in a half-finished state and say that you’ll come back later. But rarely does that ever happen and adding things to todo-lists/queues adds weight to your life that doesn’t feel good. Plus, forcing yourself to finish is a creative muscle in and of itself that can be exercised and improved at. I’ve noticed improvement with this for me for music making and writing.

What cured my writer’s/publisher’s block

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I’ve managed to make writing fun again and have been publishing a lot on my blog lately.

It’s due to three reasons:

1 – Having explicit content categories creates the freedom to post things that aren’t highly effort intensive deep dives.

By introducing explicit post categories (i.e. Micropost, Lab Notes, Essay, Deep Dive, etc) I feel much more free to post without the expectation that every post needs to be a time consuming, deeply researched technical post (which are the kind of posts that are popular).

I don’t have time for those lately, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write or post anything! Explicitly tagging something as a micropost or lab notes takes a lot of the pressure off, and makes me much more willing to write and publish.

2 – I stopped sharing on Twitter.

The curse of growing an audience is that posting to that audience has increasing weight as the audience grows, which creates stress and friction about posting. What if I post something that people don’t like and I lose a bunch of followers? What if I’m straight up wrong? What if I want to share something but don’t have time to fully polish it and people judge me? What if I post too often?

It’s also distracting to share on Twitter, and very difficult to not monitor notifications afterwards.

Furthermore, writing on Twitter was actually difficult in that it took extra energy to abide by the character limits, or fit things into threads otherwise. Writing freeform of my own blog is easier in this regard.

Not posting on Twitter removes a nontrivial amount of friction and stress that used to prevent me from sharing.

3 – Using WordPress (i.e. not a static site generator) removes a ton of friction.

The fact that I can click buttons in a web interface, write and post as easily as sending a tweet makes all the difference.

It’s so nice being able to change the website without coding. For instance, I just added a “Popular posts” feature in the sidebar in the last 5 minutes. Turns out Jetpack already has the feature included and I just had to enable it. I don’t even want to imagine what it would have taken to implement that by hand or with a static site generator.

Though not as fast a static site, the blog loads fast enough and I’m more than happy to take the performance hit.

It’s also awesome that I can quickly edit posts to fix typos, even from my phone with the WordPress app. I do this very often.

(bonus reason: It’s also due to the realization that posts don’t have to be long, can be written in one sitting, and don’t have to be absolutely perfect!)

Experiment: Categories for my posts

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I’m trying something new. I added WordPress tags for higher level categories of content that cut across the typical tags:

  • Deep Dive: Longer, more detailed posts that require significant research. Very expensive to produce.
  • Tech: Normal technical blog post. More polished than Lab Notes, less researched than Deep Dive.
  • Lab Notes: Rough notes, typically technical, usually bullet points about some topic.
  • Essay: Nonfiction writing, usually nontechnical.
  • Micropost: Tiny, short thought.

I hope that by categorizing things this way and acknowledging that this blog is a collection of different art forms (that appear similar because they’re all writing), I’ll be more comfortable publishing publicly. For a while I was scared to publish because I don’t have as much time for deep dives as before, which is what people seemed to really like, but acknowledging these different categories and specifically calling out a shorter, rougher, less polished piece as such takes the pressure off of publishing it.

Evergreen tweets

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Twitter’s length limit is deceptive. At a glance, it suggests that writing tweets should be easy and quick. This is true for superficial tweets, but does not mean all tweets are written quickly and with little effort.

Twitter is actually a platform for concise writing, and writing concisely is harder than writing verbosely. There are certain tweets I spend a lot of time on and it’s shame to have them get lost in my feed. So I’m storing them here.

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