It is quite early in the morning and I had only one cup of coffee. I have less than 20 minutes to go and yet I dared to start another blog post.

The trick is not to think of those 20 minutes. I think of it as a sprint, not a marathon, which my articles usually are. While this will be a quick and dirty post, I hope you will find it contains some useful information that will help you through your day.

A big mouth full? Maybe, but now I got your attention.

It usually takes several hours at night to complete an article and post it here. I do this to maintain a certain persistence in quality and clearness. Because I tend to write a lot, I often end up bloating up a topic that was originally merely three lines in my Moleskin notebook.

The do approach

The secret of writing a post or article that makes sense, and doing it in less time than it usually takes, is this: Choose one single line in your head, one idea, and stick to it. It’s working better if this idea isn’t a key to a million other questions, and you will have a less hard time staying focussed if it is a practical idea, like “How to do your dishes without getting bored by it”. (The answer to that would be to disconnect your hands from your brain and let your mind wander off; but this topic is exactly the kind of distraction I am trying to avoid here).

Never the less, the approach of simply doing it is the same. You may have forgotten it, but “just do it” was there before Nike claimed it as their territory in the late nineties.

The rule

Few people I know like rules. Everybody I know likes the idea of breaking with the rules better than following rules. Still, we all live by rules and we all like doing so. We depend on them actually, and most of them have sneaked in our lives without us realizing. You accept a rule when it works for you, and that happens independently of whether you like the rule, its principle or the reason why you have to follow it.

I started a new rule, and it rarely happens I exclaim something like that publicly. But the rule is so simple and has some real value, I don’t want to hide it from you.

It is called “one hour”.

I will take one hour of each day and dedicate it to write for my blog. Sounds simple. Where is the news? The new thing is, this is a mandatory rule, that it must happen within the time frame of one hour. I certainly haven’t invented the effect of the rule. Writers like Jack London or Thomas Mann were both known for their tightly scheduled hours of writing. But they took eight hours a day in which they locked themselves up in an office and you were not allowed to disturb them.

I have to leave for work in less than five minutes and I am still writing my one hour post. But that is the magic to it. I will be done before I have to go to meet my client. And it will still be one of the better posts I’ve written on this blog.

Make that “to go” please

How do you do it? Make your mind run, not walk. It is a lot of fun to let it walk and pick up every little string of associated thoughts and ideas you come across along the way. But look at the goal for your one hour-post. What you want to convey is a dense but useful bit of text.

Don’t look back, don’t correct. Don’t change, add or tweak. Let it stand. Train your mind to become better at being direct and concise. (And yes, you may break with this rule occasionally. Trying to stick with it is what improves your skills though.)

The one hour rule fits better for a writer of today. It doesn’t apply to everything I write, but it works for this post and others to follow. It is actually a lot of fun, and you should try it too.

Now I am a little late for my meeting, but I feel so much better now.