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How Writing for One Hour a Day Can Improve The Quality of Your Life
Keep the phone away
The smartphone is the biggest culprit towards your constant distraction.
Leave your smartphone in some other room for an hour to focus on your writing.
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Key Ideas
One hour of writing
Writing for an hour a day can improve your personal and professional life.
A lot can be accomplished by a focused hour of creation time, in which you are not disturbed. Deep creativity tasks, when done just a little daily, can become a lot in a year.
Increment progress matters
We tend to underestimate incremental progress. Successful people have a willingness to set micro goals and focus on the process instead of the end goal. It is natural for many to miss this as they cannot see the immediate progress.
Writing helps mental health
Writing daily can help in improving our mental health.
- It lowers anxiety
- It makes us feel present for that time
- A good habit that we enjoy makes us look forward to it
- It heals our painful experiences by making us see them objectively.
Timing and easing in
To start writing an hour a day: Figure out which part of the day you are doing unessential or no work.
Then, instead of starting with the notion that you will write for an hour, just focus on the fact that you will sit, open a notepad or your laptop, and will write.
Tips to keep writing
Create the right, distraction-free conditions to help you keep writing.
- If you plan to write in the morning, make the arrangements, like the pen/notepad and sitting place the night before.
- Use a simple writing software if you are on your laptop, removing clutter so that you only focus on your writing.
Keep the phone away
The smartphone is the biggest culprit towards your constant distraction.
Leave your smartphone in some other room for an hour to focus on your writing.
Use headphones to remove noise
Keep the noise out by using noise cancellation headphones, if possible.
You can also put soothing instrumental or beats oriented music that doesn't distract you but keeps out the noise.
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Benefits of a daily writing habit
- Better self-discipline
- Improving persuasion skills
- Cultivating self-awareness
- Better decision ma...
Writing as self-discipline
The reason why we don’t do anything useful with our time is that we lack self-discipline.
But when you write every day, you strengthen your discipline. And you can transfer that better self-discipline to achieve anything in life.
Writing cultivates self-awareness
Nothing will help you to get to know yourself more than translating your thoughts into words.
When you force yourself to write every day, you automatically become more aware of your thoughts. And self-awareness is one of the most important skills that predict career success.
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Shockingly Unproductive
- Studies show that employees spend more than five hours per day reading and replying to emails. While it may seem like urgent work, email is not the best kind of work.
Facilitate Deep Work
A few smart strategies that can be deployed:
- Installing pods for deep work while having common areas for collaborative work.
- Wearing headphones that are easily seen to signal that you are not to be disturbed.
- Turning your office into a library, following the same culture of quietness where everyone is hushed and respectful.
Email is not Real Work
Real work, by definition, should be rare, valuable and cognitively demanding.
Email does not check any of these boxes, and is, therefore, a pseudo work.
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The value of solid writing skills
- Being a good writer helps you stand out from the crowd.
- Repeated writing mistakes affect your reputation and credibility in the future.
- Your writing is ...
Kurt Vonnegut
"Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing.”
The “5 Ws + H” method
... for establishing what and how you will write:
- Who: Who is my audience?
- What: What do they need to know?
- When: When does this apply, when did this happen, or when do they need to know it by?
- Where: Where is this happening?
- Why: Why do they need this information?
- How: How should they use this information?
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