The 1 habit that will skyrocket your creative productivity

👉 and rid yourself of the need for inspiration

I bought a course about being a more productive writer a while back.

To be honest, the details of the course weren't much use to me. They were focused on tech I don't use and with a methodology that seemed over complicated.

But the core principle of the course, something I learned in the first 5 minutes after buying it, made it well worth the expense.

It's a principle that can work for you too, and help you become productively prolific at your marketing.

The core idea is that most of us approach writing (or creating content of any form) the wrong way.

The way I used to write for most of my life was to try to come up with ideas for an article or email, then think about how to explain the idea, then maybe backfill with a bit of research to add some facts and figures, then finally to draft and then edit.

Maybe you do something similar?

It's very much a "start from scratch" model.

But in many ways, writing is a lot like taking an exam at the end of a course.

When you do an end-of-course exam, you don't start from scratch and try to wing it in the exam. Or if you do, you're pretty much guaranteed to fail.

90%+ of your success in an exam comes from your preparation beforehand. How well you took in the ideas from the course, made notes, tied different concepts together.

Only a small fraction of your success is due to the inspiration you get in the exam itself.

We all know this. We all recognise that our success at passing end of course exams is down to what we do during the course and our preparation for the exam,

But with writing, we get it completely the wrong way around.

We focus on the process of idea generation and writing in-the-moment. The equivalent of what we do in the exam room. Rather than on preparing ourselves over time to be ready to succeed when we write.

Imagine how much easier creating content would be if every time you sat down to write or make a video you already had a comprehensive set of notes on the topic and had already generated a whole bunch of new ideas you could use.

Instead of spending all your time staring at a blank sheet of paper and trying to come up with ideas and the details behind them, you'd already have them at your fingertips.

You'd just have to, well, write.

So the secret to being a productive and prolific content creator isn't to somehow become a genius at the creative process. It's to make sure that over time you build up a great "database" of your ideas and notes on key topics so it's easy to create content about them when the time comes.

A couple of hours a week spent making notes on a book or article, or writing down an idea you had in the shower or summarising a discussion you had about a topic...

…all these will pay off huge dividends and make our writing 10 times faster and more powerful.

What most of us do instead is we read a book, but forget almost all of it.

We get ideas, but don't write them down or explore them and so they remain immature.

We discuss with colleagues and get new input, but it goes in one ear and out the other in a matter of days.

Time invested in proper note-taking and exploration of ideas pays back exponentially in terms of the quantity and quality of our content creation.

Making that process a habit means you'll always have all the resources you need at hand to create great content fast.

Your exact process will be up to you. But as a starting point I recommend googling a book called Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. It has really made a difference for me.

Hope it helps you too.