I may be getting ahead of myself by writing this now, as I haven’t released my ebook yet, but I wanted to share with you my method of writing. The hardest part of writing anything is getting started, so hopefully my methods will get things moving for you.
When I set out to write my productivity ebook, I had a thousand ideas running around my head, but no idea how to put them on paper. I could see the general thoughts I wanted to convey, but I couldn’t organize them properly, which effectively had me paralyzed. I realized that the key to good writing is organization.
I had teachers all through high school and college tell me that I must create an outline before I begin writing. I always ignored them, because I typically don’t know exactly what I’m going to write until I actually start writing it. My approach in school (shh, don’t tell any of my old teachers!) was to write the assignment out, and work out the outline after the fact.
But for this ebook, I knew I wanted to take a different approach. Since this is for public consumption, and I am really trying to provide useful information that can actually help people, I wanted to make sure I stayed on track, touched on all the ideas I wanted to convey, and hopefully present the information in a clear and concise manner.
Since I have had so little success with outlines in the past, I knew creating an outline was not an option. So I turned to mind mapping. Alex Jeffreys has discussed mind-mapping in his coaching program, and while I am familiar with the term, I have never actually seen it in action until he taught about it. I found this great mind-mapping software called FreeMind, which is even better because it is completely free. I then proceeded to create a mind map on everything I could think of related to productivity. This included things like avoiding distractions, staying motivated, and productivity tools. I’ll share the mind map in the actual ebook, because I don’t want to ruin the experience of reading through it.
Once I had a brain dump of absolutely everything in my head related to productivity, I set about organizing the information into categories and subcategories. This way I could see what topics were related and should be written about in the same chapter of the ebook. Once that was complete, I went to Google to start filling in the blanks. For example, I had a section of the mind map on productivity tools, but I only had one or two tools written down. I went out and researched what other tools would be useful, and added the good ones to the mind map. Once my research was complete, I had what I considered to be a complete mind map.
From there, writing the ebook was surprisingly easy. I would simply pick a section of the mind map, and create a chapter based on the topics included in that section. Once I had a road map, the writing just came easier, and I didn’t have to worry about getting off track.
My other worry was about my writing style. I have a tendency to get overly formal when I write. I think I have been successful on this blog at keeping my tone more informal and more “real,” meaning the way I speak in real life. Since I have had some positive feedback on my writing style here, I tried to stay with the same style in my ebook. A few times I drifted into a more formal “research report” style, which I then had to correct. I believe I caught them all, but I’ll be releasing a few review copies of the ebook shortly, so hopefully I’ll get some constructive feedback.
Let me know your tips for writing. I found mind mapping to be exceptionally powerful, especially with my aversion to standard outlines. If you know of a better way, I’d be eager to hear it.
