My writing process in 2020

I experienced compounded learning in 2020 and wrote like never before. I have become a better learner, thinker and writer. I started consciously working towards it from Aug 2020.

I am documenting my journey, my learnings and how I did it. The system is barebones and will continue to evolve throughout the year.

People on Twitter, whom I followed along with the additional resources I read regularly:

• Julian's manual on writing well.

• Shane Parrish's thoughts on mental models/biases.

• Anne-Laure Le Cunff's from collector to creator course

• Dickie Bush's tweets and challenges,

• Janel's Brain Pint newsletter.

• Shreyas Doshi's thoughts on product thinking.

• James Clear's articles on productivity.

• Manas Saloi's disappearing wisdom tweets and articles.

• PackyMcCormick's long-form content on Not Boring newsletter.

• Dan Shipper's superorganizers newsletter of wisdom.

• Nat Eliason's book notes inspired me to take notes too.

My Tech Stack

• Notion: knowledge base.

• Bear Notes: distraction-free writing space.

• Raindrop.io: bookmarking.

• Grammarly Premium: good writing.

• Drafts/Otter: voice notes.

• Substack: newsletter (now moved to beehiiv)

• Wix: my personal blog. (now moved to beehiiv)

• Publer/Typefully: compose tweets.

My process

I have taken an exclusive email only for newsletters. I haven't shared this email with anyone else. These inbox newsletters are the main inputs for my ideas and content and the random scrolls on Twitter throughout the day. If I stumble upon an interesting article, I first bookmark on raindrop.io. Later, I use the Notion Saver to clip and save the article in the relevant Notion database. Here is a snapshot of one of my Notion databases.

In the 1st pass reading, I keep the key ideas of my topic and delete the rest of the lines. Here, I don't put much effort and retain the important ideas in the author's words and remove the rest of the details. This is a sample article in Notion after the 1st pass. (I also add backlinks to similar articles.)

Next, I take the key points from similar articles and put them in Bear Notes. Bear is a very clutter-free software which allows me to focus and put my thoughts together. I rewrite the ideas in my own words and add my perspective too. The article above now transforms into this piece of writing on Bear.

I maintain a weekly log in Notion on what tweets and articles I read. This is a good self-accountability system. Any week I read less, I put fewer links in the weekly journal. This is an automatic feedback loop which shows me my learning week on week. My weekly log on Notion looks like this:

In summary, my writing process is: Bookmark -> Web Clip -> Key Ideas -> Mix ideas -> Rewrite. Short essays go as tweets/small essays. Multiple such points with more research become a newsletter post.

Timeline

• Aug 2020: started systematic reading and note-taking process.

• Sept & Oct 2020: deliberate reading habit and optimized my process. Started my newsletter.

• Nov 2020: pivoted my newsletter and ready to start daily writing to hone my skill.

• Dec 2020: 30 days, 30 essays challenge completed.

My 2021 Writing Goals

• 100+ personal blog posts.

• 20+ newsletter issues

• 25x250 challenge by Alex Wiec (25 mins of read/learn/apply -> 1 content).

I am setting up more systems and optimizing them, which I will share in future posts.