Episode 71: How do you write more as a freelancer or consultant?
In this episode, Kai and Nick discuss how you can write more as a consultant and revisit the importance of reusing your existing writing as ‘grist for the mill’ (repurposing it for other uses). This is a good one!
Summary
Nick and Kai walk through how they each structure their writing time, what makes professional writing readable, and why publishing frequently beats holding drafts until they feel ready. Nick guards his mornings for writing only and notices a cognitive shift after lunch that makes client calls easier but writing almost impossible. The core argument is that building a publishing practice, not just a writing practice, is what makes a consultant visible and authoritative.
Highlights
- Nick’s mornings are writing-only time, protected partly by routing European clients to a separate Calendly link so they can’t book him before 1 p.m. Central. He says a ‘bit flips’ after lunch and he becomes good at client calls but can no longer write.
- Kai’s writing windows are 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. or 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. He keeps a physical notebook on his desk to capture new ideas mid-session without switching to Trello and breaking flow.
- Kai’s bottleneck was publishing, not writing. He had over 100 WordPress drafts sitting at 70 to 80 percent done because he kept deciding they weren’t ready yet.
- Kai writes from a question as a prompt instead of a blank topic. He keeps 250 reader and client questions in a Trello swipe file, picks one, and sets a 300 to 700 word target to constrain the draft.
- Nick’s top rule for professional writing: don’t waste the reader’s time. Chunk the piece with bullets, bold statements, and headings so people can scan quickly. He edits out his own tendency toward long, comma-heavy sentences in revision.
- Nick and Kai both cite Darius Kazemi’s 2014 XOXO talk and the art Tumblr The Jogging on the value of shipping constantly. Most pieces land quietly; a few break through. Kai’s article on levels of consulting was a throwaway idea that got his highest reader engagement of the year.
- Kai’s repurpose strategy is email first, website second. Write for the newsletter, collect replies and corrections, then move the piece to the site without a date stamp. Daily emails generate 300-plus ideas per year versus roughly 50 issues from a weekly newsletter.
Read the transcript
In the process of trying to record this podcast. I don’t think you knew about this. I’m just going to place it here and we’re going to notice it and move on. But I have two Calendly links, and they look basically the same. And one of them is for 1 p. m. to 5 p. m. Central Time, and the other is for the whole day. And the reason I have the whole day one is because if you live in Europe And you get a calendarly that says 1 p. m. to 5 p. m. Central, let’s say you’re in Central European Standard Time and you’re seven hours ahead. That looks like 8 p. m. to 3 a. m. Right? So that’s horrible. And nobody should want that. So I give you the European link and it actually is like dash EU on it, and then you can schedule morning times with me. And I know because you live in Europe. If you’ve got a Cali link from me, I know where you live, right? Or I know where you are at the time. So there’s. There’s a positive thing there, and then you get my whole day thing. But like, I don’t, I try not to do that often, right? Kai used somehow found a way to use the European link and scheduled this at 10 o’clock in the morning. And I looked at it and I was like. Oh no. Oh no. We booked it at 10 in the morning, and I had to be very polite and be like, Kai, um I don’t know if you got the wrong link or something like that, but could you just use this link? And I didn’t even say what that other link was. But then you open that link and you see the times begin at 1 p. m. Central, which is what, 11 year time, something like that. And then you’re like, oh, okay, now I get it, right? And the reason I do that, and what is leading into for this episode, is my morning time is writing time, and writing time is sacred time. You do not fuck with my writing time. If you fuck with my writing time, it should be for a very good reason. And people can fuck with my writing time by like pinging me on Slack with a disaster. That’s fine. That’s a good reason, right? Or it should be just like something small, like they asked if I got an email or something like that. And I’ll be like, yup, thumbs up, whatever, et cetera. And then I’m okay. But I don’t like doing gigantic, complicated, thinky work that does not involve writing in the morning. It should involve writing. And that can take a lot of forms. That can be: I make a revised weekly lesson. My revised weekly lessons basically neatly fit into the course of a morning. I can sit in front of a microphone and talk. That’s fine. That’s a form of creation and I kind of qualify that as acceptable to impinge in my writing time. I can throw together a big proposal. I can write up a big document. I can write a letter. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s something that happens, and I don’t know if others experience this, but I’ve just kind of noticed it in my own practice. Like, A bit flips when I eat lunch, where I suddenly become exceptionally good at client work and exceptionally lousy at writing. Like I become really good at talking on Skype and just I can’t write to save my life. And I don’t know why that is. It just is, right? And I’ve kind of decided to roll with it and notice what my body is doing and how I can think, right? So, if you’ve ever gotten a letter from me in the past, you know, four years, it was probably written sometime before noon, right? And that’s about it. So there’s a lesson to be had out of this, which is I carve out a consistent writing time. And I, you know, I protect it as fiercely as I possibly can. That’s the number one suggestion I have towards you writing more, right? Cutting out distractions. If you have to use like Freedom, which is an application for your Mac or a PC that turns off the Internet because you have no willpower. That’s one thing that you can do. But other than that, like you know, I just create a space for it and do the routine and honor it.
What do you do? It’s similar for me. I found that the times where I’m most able to write, where I can just heads down and make words, are 6 a. m. to 10 a. m. Or about 9 p. m. to 1 a. m. I don’t know why it’s those times, but I could just start writing at 9 p. m. a. m. four hours past, and I’m like, I really should have been in bed three hours ago. Oh my gosh, what happened? But I completely agree with you on the importance of having a dedicated time, the importance of having a routine. One of the most impactful things That helped me write more as a consultant. Dan, in a minute, we’re going to circle back to you and talk about, like, well, what should you be writing as a consultant? Why write as a consultant? But what helped me write more was Having that routine and having that time locked out, sort of like I’m so ashamed I forget the author’s name in the book Bird by Bird, they talk about the importance of a writing practice, the importance of the concept of Daily pages, just writing to get the ideas out of your head and get started with the day. Creating those as habits as part of my daily routine made it easier for me to write because I knew this is writing time. I’m going to write now. That might be Staring at the screen, and I’m just going to make a mark on the screen. I’m just going to write something and see where that idea takes me. In terms of, should we get a little more tactical, or should we talk a little bit about what you could be writing and why write as a consultant?
Um one of the so this is one of the weird things about writing. I have my own routine for writing and I never really talk about it. Because everybody has their own weird routines for writing. It’s like recommending a to-do list manager or a calendar utility. Like I can tell you what my it’s like I can tell you what my to-do list manager is. And then you’re like, great. And then you use it. And you’re like, I hate this. This is horror. How do you get anything done? How are you a functional human being? And the same thing with calendaring. They’re like, I couldn’t. I looked at it and it was like staring into the void, and it was horrible. And so I can tell you my writing tools. But I think like, you know, I can recommend a bunch of things. The key is to find a system that works for you. Never apologize for it. It can be weird and dumb, right? Like if you have to burn incense and sacrifice a goat every morning, and it helps you become a better writer. Great. If you have to like smoke or drink before you write, like fine. That is fine. Like, there’s nothing, you are not a weird space alien for needing to force yourself into a space of writing. And people are like, How are you such a good writer? And I’m like, Well, I sit down and I write a lot. You know, and I’m not, and I operate without, I try and honor the basic rules. And we’ll talk about some of the basic rules because those are pretty universal, at least in English. And I and I try and be fearless about my own voice. And we’ve talked a lot about this in a previous podcast episode about how we’ve cultivated our own voice. So I’m not going to retread that ground. Some of the basic rules. If you are writing, let’s assume that you’re an audience of consultants and you’re not making the great American novels. So you’re writing professionally in some capacity and you need something to be digestible and actionable. Chunk up your writing with bullet points, bolded statements, and headings so that people can scan them better. By adding structure to your document, you are making it easier for people to understand quickly so that they can go back to the process of living the rest of their lives. Ask yourself whether you are writing or creating in a way that wastes the reader’s time. If you are doing it, you should throw it away and do something else that does not waste their time. The number one goal of my letters, and this goes from the 1600-word email I wrote about a sandwich I ate once. to the whole like deep dive into a Kickstarter project. Everything that I’ve written, number one goal, don’t waste the reader’s time. It should at least be vaguely interesting and helpful. And secretly, even the weird, dumb stuff that I write about is helpful, right? The one time I got drunk in Canada is a lesson on service and managing a crowd of people in a way that makes them feel welcomed and loved. Right. And you don’t have to think about that, right? As you’re reading it, but you get that. It is imparted in some way. Next rule. Don’t fuck with grammar or style in a way that affects your tone and makes it noticeable. I use very plain language and very plain sentence phrasings most of the time. I have to go back in editing most of the time and recognize that I tend to write very long, flowery, comma, and semicolon delimited sentences, and that only rarely is that actually useful as far as reading. You are writing in order to get read. You are not writing in order to make yourself feel good. Um Beyond that, I don’t know what other recommendations I have. I’d have to think about it a little bit harder. But like, um That’s about it on my front. What do you do?
A lot of what you describe, I separate the writing from the editing process and even the writing from the review process. I have embraced the idea of a shitty first draft. The number one thing that was holding me back writing for years was feeling that it needed to be good as I wrote it. No, it just needs to be written as I write it. I could go back and edit it. I could go back and revise it. I just need to get the words out on the page. As I started doing daily emails and writing more that way, I found setting an upper word count to aim for, saying like I want to aim for 300 to 500 or 500 to 750 words in this thing, gives me a target. And if I think of something else to add in, I’m able to, I actually literally keep a notebook on my desk and I physically write down the idea. I should write about this thing. Just because I don’t want to break my flow by tabbing to Trello and adding a card and describing the idea, I just want to jot down, write a thing about that thing, and then continue writing the version of the article that I’m writing right now. One thing that has been incredibly helpful, and I always related to college, is writing from a prompt. A lot of the time, I feel as consultants, or at least in my own writing practice over the years, I sat down and I was like, I need to write a thing. What do I write about? I don’t know. Oh my gosh. And then an hour passes, and I’m just filled with anxiety. Instead, I think back to college, and while you’re given an essay prompt, you’re given a question-to-answer. write ten pages about why this form of medieval English something something something yada yada yada or maybe something more applicable. Starting with a question is incredibly powerful. And in all of my writing now, I start with a question. It’s a question that a reader may have asked me, a client may have asked me, I might have stumbled on it. Forum or in a discussion group. I might have seen somebody ask in Slack a question I’ve seen somebody else answer recently, and I want to contribute my view to the discussion. But starting from that question as a prompt. It’s like the first mark on a blank canvas. I’m able to say, okay, so based for this question, where do I want to go? What direction do I want to take it in? So I have a large swipe file in Trello. It’s 250 different Questions people have asked me through my newsletter or through other channels. And so when it comes time to write something, instead of saying, I need to write a thing, what do I write? I’m starting from a point of saying, well, I’m answering the question. Maybe I’m answering the question, hey, how do you write more as a consultant? And okay, now I have the constraint of Well, this is going to be about that topic. And I add a second constraint of it’s going to be a daily email, so it’s going to be 300 to 700 words long. Okay, that’s easier for me to do a shady first draft of. Once I generate that draft, I’m trying to practice now that I’m writing more, I found that the bottleneck really isn’t Developing that habit of writing, and it never really was developing that habit of writing, it was developing that habit of publishing. I personally get stuck in a loop where I say, ah, this isn’t good enough to publish yet. I’ll hold off on it. And that’s how I ended up with over 100 drafts in WordPress of posts that were like 70 or 80% done. But I was like, this isn’t good enough yet. I can’t publish it yet. So I’ve tried to adopt a mindset of I’m just going to publish it. And the great thing about the internet is I can edit it. And if I send out an email and something’s wrong and somebody writes back, okay, it was an email and I’m going to write another one tomorrow or another one next week. And if it’s a blog post, okay, I get to edit it. And I think that adopting a mindset of publishing more is very valuable as a writer because if you just continually write but you never publish, well, nobody’s going to see evidence of the fact that you’re a writer. If you continually publish, even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s only 50 or 70% the point you want to get to, you’re putting the content out there People are going to see it. People are going to see that you are writing. And because you are publishing more frequently, you are going to get better at generating ideas, getting questions, figuring out what to write about, making the clackety-clack noise, and getting something out there. And I don’t know if it’s. The standards that I feel my writing needs to meet have gone down. I don’t think it is. I think it’s more that the imaginary barrier I put up before I could hit the publish button. I’ve started to reduce that, and it’s become easier for me to say, hey, I spent 30 minutes writing this thing. I’m going to hit publish on it now. Because once I hit publish, once I finish this one article, It’s now freed me up mentally, emotionally, physically to work on the next article. Hitting the done button means I can now start working on something else. Fresh of an article or a piece of content, be it an updated web page, a service offering. a proposal or something else. It just sits there. I can’t think about anything else.
Yeah. Uh once it’s done, you really shouldn’t re-edit it unless you’re planning on polishing it up for like another compilation or something like that, like I did with um like draft evidence or something like that. I uh yeah, yeah. Uh ha I don’t I don’t like this website and I don’t really know if I like the person who runs this website, so it’s weird citing it as like an inspirational example. But I read his profile in the New Yorker and it’s um It’s an art website called The Jogging, which was like a really influential Tumblr in the early teens of this decade. It’s the sentiment behind it. It’s basically a tumbler that tries to churn out as much art as humanly possible, as quickly as humanly possible. By a larger group of people. And the theory, and the reason they call it the jogging, is basically like you should always be working and putting out new work and not like waiting two and a half years to put out something new. And that’s kind of anathema in the art world, right? Like you wait a long time and then you put out another group show, or you put out like You don’t put out like a new work a week, you know, it’s not something that really happens. So that is a very contrarian idea in that particular world, but it makes Perfect sense if you’re a consultant. You should be basically generating an informal broadcast network around yourself because that helps create kind of more of an aura. Around your work. And if you’re not doing that, what we’re talking about is creating a writing practice, right? We’re not talking about, oh, this is how you get writing done in the morning and how you get over your shit. You should have gotten over your shit three years ago. if you’re trying to be a consultant. And if you’re not doing that, then develop a writing practice now or find a job at Google.
In a sense, even I’d make one small amendment there. It’s a publishing practice. I mean, what I take away from jogging is they’re committed not to the act of creating a piece of art, but of publishing a piece of art frequently.
Yeah, it’s I mean, you can’t just let it languish in your notebook. Like, we’re not talking about this whole episode, have we been talking about writing or video creation that just sits in your folder and doesn’t do anything? No, the goal is to ship it and put it in front of people so you can help them.
Right. That’s one of the reasons I absolutely love the switch I’ve made to daily emails because it’s. It’s getting more content out there. I mean, I think about my sending a newsletter once a week. I get 50-ish issues out in a year. Sending a daily, they might be shorter But I’m touching 300 plus ideas each year. I have more contact with people. I’m sharing more ideas. I’m producing more things. I’m reaching new conclusions. I think that, yeah, I like the sentiment of the jogging. tumbler. com. I like that concept.
Yeah, and I mean it’s something that like it’s something that might come as a duh thing to everybody who’s not involved in the art world, but for me it was like a neat expression of like What I’m trying to do, right? I write a letter every week. I don’t stop. You don’t Stop. You don’t let the list go cold. That is a way to kill your list.
Darius Cazini?
Yeah.
Off-cited on Make Money Online for his presentation at the 2014 EXOXO Festival, How I Won the Lottery, he switched over from creating a few projects each year to creating as many projects as he could each year and just launching things. And you end up with this interesting distribution where a lot of the things you ship when you adopt this publish frequently, publish, often create, often share, often mindset Not a big reaction. A few get an incredible reaction. And I think it’s by frequently publishing, by frequently creating, by frequently writing, by frequently sharing, you find those things that resonate better with your audience. One of the most popular pieces of content. I’ve created in the last year was an article I wrote for my mailing list on the levels of consulting, and it got some of the most engagement and replies of anything I’ve ever written. And it honestly was a throwaway idea that I was like, I really need to publish an article today. Let me write on this concept that I’ve been asked about a couple times. And people responded to it very well, but it was something I quickly wrote and quickly shared and got out there. And because of that, it was one of those pieces that sort of won the lottery more than another. And I think. Darius’s talk, we’ll link it to it in the show notes, but is a wonderful, wonderful expression of this idea.
Yeah, yeah. It’s um You’re I mean, a more uncharitable reading of Kazimi’s talk is that he’s throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, but a more charitable reading of it is that he shows up to work and does the work every day. Writing is part of your job. You now have a job where you are writing. Congratulations. If you disagree, you can quit.
So as a consultant, what are the different types of writing you do?
Oh God, well for me in particular, that one can do.
For let’s do for you and then for one and then for me.
Yeah, with me, I have my weekly letters. I have revised weekly, I have draft analysis. Revised weekly is basically lessons about A-B testing that come out every Monday. I’ve been doing a new one for the past year and change. Draft analysis has been around for a month and a half. I sit down and record a video teardown of a new website every week or every other week, I’m sorry. And I mean, a lot of client work, I’d say, takes the form of writing. So if I sit in, you know If I’m making a report for somebody, I do that in the morning. So that’s definitely a form of writing. I that’s about it. That’s about it. client facing or not, you know?
Yeah. Sales pages also I think would be in there.
Yeah, marketing pages are weird. I do those usually early afternoon. They’re really rare. But I only make like five or six a year. Yeah, but they fall into that.
Yeah, for me, the different types of writing I do would be writing daily emails, writing Content for courses or for lessons, writing for client projects, writing for my website, be it service offerings or content pages or course pages. Book writing, whether it’s revising, say, Outreach Blue Brand or Podcast Outreach, or working on new books. It really falls into, I think, like marketing emails, proposals, website content, and larger works of writing books, mini books, booklets. It takes all these different shapes and forms. Yeah, the more frequently I’ve published, the better it’s been and the easier it’s been to write, because it, I think, shows me that, oh, hey, if I publish something that I feel is only 70% done, but it gets a great reaction. Maybe the bar is only at 70% of what I thought it was. And so I could calibrate down, and instead of holding myself to a higher standard, I could ship earlier and more often. and get more things out the door, more exposure, more feedback on the things I’m creating, and see where that takes me.
Yeah, yeah, I totally feel that. You’re developing a set of things you’re doing periodically that constitute writing. It really depends on the person. I’m sure that if I looked at any of our colleagues’ writing plans like Kurt or Philip Morgan or somebody, like they’re all doing vastly different things.
Yeah. One, there’s a reader on my email list who wrote in a couple weeks ago with this question. How do you balance writing for your website articles. Not you, Nick, but you how does one. Versus writing for your email list. How do you know what to prioritize? And I’m very much of the opinion that You could repurpose content in either direction. And so, if you write an article for your site, you could email it out and it takes a place with a newsletter. But I think the easiest path is write newsletter first. Write the content that you send out to your newsletter. Get the feedback from people. Hey, I agreed with this. Hey, can you elaborate on this? Hey, I have a question about this. Hey, this part doesn’t make sense. It is actually wrong. Here’s a citation. Then incorporate those bits and then publish it to your site. And either weekly or monthly, just match, move across articles. Don’t put a date stamp on there, just have them on your site and move them across. Not a lot of people are using the RSS as they used to, so I wouldn’t worry about, hey, five new articles just hit my site the same day. I think if you write email first and then move it across to your site, It allows at least me to ship more often, to write more often, to take three daily emails and turn it into a larger article that I then publish. And so I don’t have to decide: well, am I writing content for my site or writing for my email? Instead, I’m writing for my readers, and the content I’m writing for my readers on my email list then becomes content for the readers on the website, then becomes content for the readers of Beat blocks.
Yeah, yeah, you should be doing what you can to repurpose your content across many channels. We wrote it we talked about that extensively in one episode of the podcast where we were talking about reusing stuff more effectively. What else around this? Hmm.
I think we touched on it, but just to explicitly say why we talked a lot about the how to write more as a consultant. Why write more as a consultant? It’s like Robin Sloan’s article, Stock and Flow on Snark Market, from a few close to a decade ago now, I guess. Where if you’re putting out this content more frequently, more actively. You’re going to be getting in front of more people. You’re going to be sharing more ideas. You’re going to have more opportunities come up. The whole concept of the luck surface area: the opportunities you’re presented in life are a function of what you put out there and how many people see it. Why write more as a consultant? So you’re exposed to more people. So you start to develop your ideas, your theories, your controversial opinions. You are an area of expertise, and you have. content and articles and resources to share and show it off and display hey, the industry says, hey, I actually strongly say B, and this is why. And that’s attractive and that’s something you’re able to share with clients, work into your marketing, work into your overall messaging. So Why write more? Because it helps develop you as an expert and an authority.
That’s pretty much it.