If you want to make more money in your business you need… more.
Either more output and volume (more emails, sales letters, products, ads) or more quality in whatever you output.
There’s no way around it.
"More" requires that you’re "productive" when you’re working – that you produce a lot. So the faster you can go while you’re working, the better results you’ll get.
And in order to be productive and fast you need to NOT procrastinate.
In this series of emails I’m going to show you some things I’ve done this year to speed up, to be more productive, and then next week we’ll start talking about procrastination.
Now, here’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about writing speed this year.
I learned this from a mentor/coach I hired at the beginning of 2024 and it’s worked wonders in my business.
It’s stupidly simple, but when it finally clicks for you, I can guarantee you’ll write at least 10x faster.
Productivity Trick #1: "Share what you ACTUALLY do, even if it’s not sexy."
I spent a long portion of my career searching for, and trying to write about, the optimal ways to do things.
And that’s a giant mistake.
But when it comes time to write, if I’m trying to talk about a process or a story or anything that I haven’t actually lived or experienced, it’s a slog and I go super slow.
Let me ground this in a hypothetical.
Let’s say I’m trying to write about "how to setup a website."
If I haven’t already setup a website for myself, several times, then I have a lot of work I need to do before I can confidently write anything.
I need to research the best places to buy a domain name, the best website hosts, the best platforms, etc.
Then I need to figure out the steps for getting setup.
And after all that I still have a major problem – I’m just writing about the hypothetical best way to setup a website – the "sexy" version. But that version is NOT based in reality. It hasn’t been battle tested, and I’ll be uncertain of any steps I might be missing.
Anything I write about setting up a website like this will lack the necessary confidence I need to write FAST.
Confidence and speed work hand-in-hand.
You might think that I’m saying, "Do your research before you write". But I think the advice I’m giving goes much deeper than just "researching first".
"Research", for the most part, only takes you right to that "how it works in an ideal world" precipice. Most research you do will not be first-hand, experience-based stuff. In other words, it’s not "real world" information that you’re gathering.
There’s a subtle yet huge difference.
What I’m saying here is – if you want to move FAST, write FAST and be more productive – start writing about (or only write about) things you’ve already done.
Don’t try to make it sexy or "ideal".
Literally just write about what you’ve actually already done – the truth – and you’ll move 10x faster.
The shocking part about this type of writing, you’ll find, is this is EXACTLY the type of writing your audience and customers are desperate for.
They want to know what you ACTUALLY ate, did, took, learned, etc. They don’t want an idealized version – because they’ve already tried the idealized version and it didn’t work. They want to pay you to find out what actually works even if it’s not sexy.
And best of all – when you write about what you actually do, you write so much faster.
What this means in practice is:
- If you’re writing is going slowly – chances are you haven’t done enough "research". You need more information, preferably real-world experience. Once you have it, your writing will go faster because then you’re just documenting instead of creating.
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Stop writing about the perfect way to do things, and start writing about what you ACTUALLY do.
As a meta example: this email took me about 10 minutes to write (because I actually started using this trick religiously in 2024).
Now, there’s one other thing you can do to take this productivity trick and put it on over-drive. And I’ll show you that tomorrow.
Talk then!
– Derek