Daily Writing Habits That Help Me Write 10,000 Words a Week

That's over half a million words a year

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

I write around 10,000 words a week, which is over half a million a year. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how I do it. But ultimately, it all starts with good writing habits.

I’ve always tracked my habits, for many years using a basic pen and paper system. This week I got introduced to Notion (thanks

Hudson Rennie

- I’m not sure if I love you or hate you for this one right now).

I tend to live under a rock in some ways, so I’m probably late to the party on this one. But if you’re a rock dweller like me, Notion is an app that allows you to easily organise your whole life and become super productive (I hope - that’s my aim with it).

One of the things I love is that it has a built-in habit tracker, that I’ll mostly use for daily habits related to being a fit, healthy, functioning human being with a manageable work/life balance. (It’s a magic app, I’m hoping, because that’s what I need.)

I’ll also be using it to track my daily writing habits, which need to be fiercely dialled in this year because I’ve set myself some pretty audacious goals. Here are the daily writing-related habits I’ve spent years developing, and that I’ll be carefully tracking:

• Writing (obviously). I’m focused on Medium and Substack for my own writing right now, plus freelancing.

• Researching new markets. And developing ideas to pitch them.

• Connecting with my writing community - via Substack, Twitter/X, and my (mostly Facebook-based) writing groups.

• Learning. I’ve talked about how I’m planning to become a world-class fiction writer by studying just one hour a day. (It’s going horribly so far, by the way - I’m glad I’ve found a magic app to help.)

• Working on and/or promoting my Gumroad products.

• Updating and/or promoting my Kindle book.

• Taking a baby step towards something on my Writer’s Bucket List.

Those are the writing-related habits that keep me consistently productive the vast majority of the time (we all have glitches, setbacks, and just plain bad days, of course). I hope they inspire you to make your own trackable habit list, on paper, in Notion or via the app of your choice.

Some thoughts from others I’ve been enjoying this week

• 15 ideas for quick content so you have something you can publish even if you don’t have much time by

  Alex Mathers

• 30 Days of Consistent Publishing and Engagement on Medium — Here’s How it Impacted my Stats and Earnings by

  David McIlroy

• Effective Writing and Marketing Strategies for Authors: Stay Motivated and Boost Visibility by

  BadRedheadMedia, LLC

• Six Types of Creative Failures and How to Learn from Them by

  Karin Gillespie

• My Fremium Strategy: 6 paid Subscribers in 5 days by

  Veronica Llorca-Smith

• How To Stop Feeling Awkward About Asking Readers To Pay You by

  Kristi Keller

What else I’ve been up to this week

Reading: The Everyday Hero Manifesto by Robin Sharma

Listening to: The Tortured Poet’s Department (me and a few billion others it seems)

Enjoying: Finding my way around Notion

Not enjoying: Finding my way around Notion (it’s always a love hate thing for me learning a new system or platform)

My recent Medium posts

(Friend links, of course, so you can read for free):

• 20 Things I Do Every Week - To slowly but surely improve my life

• The Best Personal Finance Books For Women - And why we often need different advice than men do

• All The Things I’ve Learned In My First Month on Substack- And what I want to learn next

That’s all for this week. If you’re reading this online, feel free to subscribe to get future posts straight to your inbox.

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