This post is an effort to give you a peek into ‘how I work’ or rather ‘how I write’.

I like going from a period of high intensity to deep rest. Deep rest is the glorified name for a period of extreme slacking.

The day you are reading about is from a period of high intensity.

Let’s start with my routine for that day, and then I’ll share one important observation and some thoughts on the output.

Routine

Except for Sundays, I write every day.

I write more on Saturdays and call them my writing days.

Here is how I wrote more than 3000 words on a recent Saturday.

I started writing around noon.

Wrote straight for 1 hour.

Had lunch by 2 pm.

Then wrote for 2.5 hours.

Took a break from writing, enjoyed coffee, and watched a movie.

In the middle of it all, I napped for 10 minutes, around 5 pm, to make sure I was alert.

Then worked from 7 to 9.30 pm on business stuff.

Had dinner between 9.30 and 10.30 pm.

Wrote again from 10.30 pm to 2.30 am. Then I did a mix of slacking and writing from 3 to 7 am, wrote for about 2 of these 4 hours.

In total, I wrote 3535 words in 10 hours of writing. I arrived at this word count after a round of editing so these posts were almost ready to go.

Big Observation

The big observation is that on the days when I write for several hours I come up with a lot more ideas to write and writing flows better. So on the days when I write for one or two hours, I may be hard-pressed for ideas. This almost never happened when I decide to write through the day and I get 5-6 or even more ideas to write about. This I believe is because I allow myself to immerse into then act of writing and this allows me to get into a state of flow.

Output

On Saturday, I keep a writing goal.

My writing goal is not related to word count but article count.

Since I started my daily writing challenge, I mostly write 2 articles every Saturday but on this particular Saturday I wrote 5. I was aiming for finishing 8 but I did not go hard after the goal so I did 5. I was happy about it because I liked what I wrote. It is not always that way.

I avoid looking up research to substantiate what I am thinking while writing but for some of the articles that day I looked up the research and included it in those articles. Wrote a mix of data backed plus experiment based posts, to keep it interesting for me.

I am curious to know how often do you write? What do you enjoy most about it when you do it?