Passionate full stack web developer, course author for Educative, book author for Packt, he/him.
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Thank you for asking, this is a very good and central question to the entirety of content creation.
I only work 80%. That's more or less a left-over of my studies that I finished in May 2020, I simply learned to enjoy three day weekends a lot, but that didn't cut it. I felt unproductive. So I got into writing articles.
You might've already guessed that I spend that extra day for writing, usually that's Monday. I usually have 3 to 4 draft articles I work on in a pretty unstructured manner. Articles like these, those that don't contain any tech examples, take me a few hours maximum, including proof reading, deleting half it, writing it again and proofreading again. Proof reading can be done while sitting in a bus or the train as well, I consider public transport as "dead time" that can be used productively (you don't have to drive yourself, unlike a car).
When writing tech tutorials, I usually code the entire thing first. So, for example, my latest tutorial on different ways to teach a machine to play Tic-Tac-Toe took me some 8 to 16 hours to code out entirely and another 8 to 16 hours to make an article out of it. Sometimes I code something for a side project and think to myself "this would make a really good tutorial", so I re-code the thing in a standalone, more simple, less optimized manner (less optimization = less obfuscation = easier to understand) and then get going. This approach has the advantage that I can basically use an idea twice lol.
What I can recommend is to take notes whenever you're learning something new and want to write an article about it later on. Just a list of simple words or steps you've taken, but less detailed than what you would write in the finished article. You then already have a draft of the content and the rough structure of the article, rest is details, really.
Thanks Pascal, that sounds like a good way to work! I usually tell my customers I only work 4 days a week, which mostly means Monday to Friday when trying to fit in a company schedule as a freelancer, but often it also means still working on Fridays anyway, after doing some of my inspirational ~20% like learning, writing, walking or some other sort of "procrastination" before my weekend. (I learned to embrace procrastination as a good thing as long as I get enough work done).
I kept wondering how some people like yourself manage to post quality content on a regular basis. I also started to draft more than one article when I find time for writing, but as DEV's gamification (and rumors that algorithms in general tend to favor posting often and regularly) might push creators to rather strive for the "achievement" of a long weekly publication streak instead of focusing on quality content.
Your article appeared just in time when I was about to finish my rant about gamification favoring quantity over quality, so I thought you deserved a quotation as one example of how to publish a lot without sacrificing quality. That this is only possible if you have enough spare time for research and writing, was exactly what I suspected from my own experience.
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Thank you for asking, this is a very good and central question to the entirety of content creation.
I only work 80%. That's more or less a left-over of my studies that I finished in May 2020, I simply learned to enjoy three day weekends a lot, but that didn't cut it. I felt unproductive. So I got into writing articles.
You might've already guessed that I spend that extra day for writing, usually that's Monday. I usually have 3 to 4 draft articles I work on in a pretty unstructured manner. Articles like these, those that don't contain any tech examples, take me a few hours maximum, including proof reading, deleting half it, writing it again and proofreading again. Proof reading can be done while sitting in a bus or the train as well, I consider public transport as "dead time" that can be used productively (you don't have to drive yourself, unlike a car).
When writing tech tutorials, I usually code the entire thing first. So, for example, my latest tutorial on different ways to teach a machine to play Tic-Tac-Toe took me some 8 to 16 hours to code out entirely and another 8 to 16 hours to make an article out of it. Sometimes I code something for a side project and think to myself "this would make a really good tutorial", so I re-code the thing in a standalone, more simple, less optimized manner (less optimization = less obfuscation = easier to understand) and then get going. This approach has the advantage that I can basically use an idea twice lol.
What I can recommend is to take notes whenever you're learning something new and want to write an article about it later on. Just a list of simple words or steps you've taken, but less detailed than what you would write in the finished article. You then already have a draft of the content and the rough structure of the article, rest is details, really.
Does that answer your question?
Thanks Pascal, that sounds like a good way to work! I usually tell my customers I only work 4 days a week, which mostly means Monday to Friday when trying to fit in a company schedule as a freelancer, but often it also means still working on Fridays anyway, after doing some of my inspirational ~20% like learning, writing, walking or some other sort of "procrastination" before my weekend. (I learned to embrace procrastination as a good thing as long as I get enough work done).
I kept wondering how some people like yourself manage to post quality content on a regular basis. I also started to draft more than one article when I find time for writing, but as DEV's gamification (and rumors that algorithms in general tend to favor posting often and regularly) might push creators to rather strive for the "achievement" of a long weekly publication streak instead of focusing on quality content.
Your article appeared just in time when I was about to finish my rant about gamification favoring quantity over quality, so I thought you deserved a quotation as one example of how to publish a lot without sacrificing quality. That this is only possible if you have enough spare time for research and writing, was exactly what I suspected from my own experience.