Top Content Productivity Tips For Content Creation

• • Work During Your Most Productive Hours

We are all unique in our own way. Some of us find the peace in the mornings before the world wakes up, to be the best time to focus on getting work done. Others are night owls that love to work in the stillness of the night. Whatever floats your boat, make it work for you.

This said, research has also proved that there is no specific time of the day when everyone is more or less productive. On an average, majority of humans tend to be very productive in the morning hours. Create content during your most productive hours.

The beauty of working in your most productive hours is that your mood hits a high and even complicated work tends to become easy and get done at half the time as against struggling through it longer during non-productive hours and taking twice as much time to produce mediocre or passable quality at best.

Beware, do not force yourself to work long hours to reach your content creation goal as it can prove to be a drain on time and resources.

• • Get Rid Of Distractions

Distractions stop us all from achieving our goals. How many times do we check the email throughout the day, the pings of the text messages, Facebook to catch up on gossip and what our extended friends circle is doing, all we need is an excuse to lose focus on our goals. This is part of being human.

Sadly, this can be a huge productivity killer. A few things that you can do to safeguard yourself is to
Put your phone in silent mode or better still power it down during your productive hours.

Have the browser tabs related to your work like research, video hunting for your content, looking for images – these are legit needs and ensure they are the only tabs open
Focus on anything that enhances your content writing and ignore the rest

If you are working in a noisy environment like a coffee shop or busy workplace, use good quality noise canceling headphones.

The late legendary basketballer Kobe Bryant in an interview with GQ Magazine confessed that he did not have too many friends as he always focused on getting work done. He loved working and enjoyed doing it. He did not have time for aimless socializing and hangouts. Work was his primary goal and took center stage in his life.

• • Use The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro technique  is a time management technique invented by Francesco Cirillo in the eighties. It helps maintain high levels of productivity.

You can use the timer on your computer or the app on your phone. Set the timer for 25 minutes (calculated as 1 Pomodoro). Focus completely on your project in this limited amount of time. Avoid any distraction in this time frame like the plague.

When the 25 minutes is gone, chill out for the next 5 minutes. Then set the timer for another 25 minutes followed by a 5 minute break.

Repeat this sequence over 4 Pomodoros (4 x 25 min segments). This deserves an awesome reward. Take a time out for 30 minutes.

Put this technique into practice today. Be sincere about it. In the next 2 or 3 days, you will become so used to it that you will start loving it, especially when you see the great work you are getting done.

• • Complete At least 2 Articles Everyday

No one ever said content creation is easy. Like everything else, as you continue writing everyday, using these productivity hacks to aid you, it will become a habit. Research says it takes 21 days to form a new habit. Using these techniques, you can rest assured you can do it much quicker.

The content outline provides enough fodder. Again, the outline is not engraved in stone. You can tweak it and modify it further as you do your research and glean more knowledge in your domain.

Again, I don’t believe in quantity. It is quality that matters. The size of articles is a major bone of contention. Pundits insist on 1000 or 2000 word articles. My view is that as long as you present information clearly and concisely and get the message across, in this case, get your reader to take action that you recommend, you have won the battle. It does not matter if you do it in 500 words or 5,000 words.

If you are a subject expert with years of accumulated knowledge, you can whip out content far easily and voluminously. Not everyone is in the same boat. If you have to research your way using Google, then focus on the all important research to create the quality content.

• • Perfection Is The Enemy Of Progress

So said Sir Winston Churchill! It is apt in this context of content creation. All the successful writers just write freely and naturally to produce the first draft. This is so vital to avoid the setting in of writer’s block, when the mind goes numb and analysis paralysis takes over.

Writer’s block is not that you have not written for ages, measured by lack of content produced over time. It really is the time flying by without meaningful productivity in the job being done.

Don’t wait to check the typos, punctuation and/or grammatical errors. Concentrate on getting as many articles written. The work will be error prone but it doesn’t matter. It is important for you to get all the ideas swimming in your head into the article being created.

The bottom line is, when your creative juices are flowing, you don’t want to block the streaming of ideas by pausing to make changes. Such distractions cause disruption in the flow of ideas. Get the articles created per your content calendar plan as fast as you can.