It would be nice if you could spend hours lovingly crafting each and every health article that you write. But chances are if you did that, you wouldn’t make enough money to pay the bills.
That’s why if you want to succeed as a health writer, you need to learn how to write faster. But don’t worry, efficiency and quality are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, by streamlining how you create content, you can save time on routine tasks and use that extra time to create more interesting content or make your writing sparkle a little bit more.
Here are a few ways to save time when writing health articles.
1. Write faster by focusing better
One of the biggest time sinks during writing is switching between tasks.
While multitasking can feel productive, research shows that multitaskers are 40 percent less productive overall. They also take 50 percent longer to accomplish a single task.
The reason for this is that every time you switch tasks, your brain has to get up to speed on the new task. If you switch often enough, you are never really up to speed.
Think of how much faster you could write health articles if when you sat down to write, you actually just wrote.
To focus better while writing, try the following:
- Block off focused writing time. Set aside time during your day when you can turn off your email and telephone and just write. If you don’t need to do online research, I also recommend turning off your internet; this helps minimize distractions. You may even want to alert your coworkers (or housemates), so they don’t stop by your office when you are deep in the flow of writing.
- Break your writing down into discrete tasks. This includes things like idea generation, research, outlining, writing, editing, and adding graphics and images. Each of these activities requires a different type of focus, so they are best done on their own. If you are working on several health articles, you can even batch some of this work, such as searching for images or doing related research.
- Use placeholders for missing information. When you sit down to write, you may not have all the information you need at your fingertips. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop right then and go find it. When I’m writing a health article and don’t have a fact or quote handy, I put in a placeholder, something like “x percent of people in the United States had obesity in yyyy.” That way, I can look up that statistic later. You can also do this with graphs or images, making a note on the fly of what might work well in the article.
- Schedule tasks at the optimum time. After more than ten years of working as a health and science journalist, I know that my best writing happens early in the day. Later on, the words tend to drag, which turns a quick story into a never-ending story. So schedule tasks for when you will be at your peak … for that task. Also, whenever possible, take a break between writing and editing. That way, you’ll come at it with fresh eyes.
2. Improve your writing process
Writing is an act of creation. But there are many tasks that support that creativity. To write faster, you need to streamline those activities as well.
The first step is to document all the tasks that you do when writing, no matter how small. This might include:
- Coming up with content ideas
- Keyword research (if you are doing search engine optimization, or SEO)
- Conducting research
- Expert interviews
- Outlining
- Drafting
- Editing
- Finalizing the content
- Publishing and sharing the content
If you use an editorial calendar to keep track of the health articles that you write, many of these steps are probably included there.
As you document these tasks, write down:
- Who does the task?
- What steps are involved?
- Which tools do you use to help you carry out the task?
Just documenting these tasks can help you write faster. For example, if you use the same tools each time for a certain step, you will no longer have to Google the name of the tool or search in your bookmarks for it. It will be right there in your documentation.
Once you have all of these steps documented, you can start to look for ways to save time. Maybe it would be better if the person who finalizes the content also schedules it for publishing. Or you could always schedule your expert interviews after your initial research so your questions are more focused.
3. Time your writing
If you are writing a novel, there can be value in getting lost in creativity and writing for hours at a time. But if you are writing health articles, it can be dangerous to have an open-ended deadline.
If you give yourself one week to write an article, chances are you will drag it out for that entire week. But if you set a firm deadline of having it done in two days, you will find a way to make it happen.
Here are some ways to use time to your advantage.
Break tasks into smaller units. This is project management 101. It’s easier to estimate how long it takes to do a task if it is smaller. The good news is that you may have already done this above when you broke apart your writing process into discrete tasks: idea creation, research, writing, etc.
Set deadlines for each task. Once you have those discrete units, assign them deadlines. This implies that you know how long it takes you to complete them. You can use your past experience to estimate this.
I use Trello to organize my workflow, which allows me to set deadlines. For each health article that I write, I have separate tasks for finding/interviewing experts, researching, writing, and submitting the article. I assign these tasks to specific days and times, which forces me to keep moving.
Write in smaller intervals. Even if you’ve blocked off four hours for content creation, you still want to take frequent breaks during that time.
One commonly used method is the Pomodoro Technique, where you work in 25-minute intervals with five-minute breaks in between, with a longer break after every fourth interval. I do a variation of this, with one-minute breaks every 30 minutes, plus a five-minute break every fourth time.
Taking breaks will help you stay fresh while writing. But it also gives you a chance to look away from your computer screen, which is good for your eyes.
If you are worried that you will lose the writing flow by doing this, stopping mid-sentence or mid-paragraph may actually improve your writing. This is a technique that writers Ernest Hemingway and Roald Dahl used.
4. Use tools to write faster
Take a look at your content creation workflow again. Are there any places where you could use a tool to save time?
Here are few that I frequently use when writing health articles.
Set up alerts. By setting up alerts, information will show up in your email inbox without having to seek it out. There are several that I use:
- Google Alerts. This works just like searching on Google, but it emails you new search results as they happen, once a day, or once a week.
- Google Scholar. This lets you receive citations for new scientific or medical papers based on your search terms. You can also subscribe to receive alerts when a researcher you follow publishes a new scientific paper.
- Journal websites and PubMed. You can subscribe to alerts for new scientific or medical papers.
- Blogs. Many blogs allow you to subscribe to their news feed, so you will never miss the latest content.
Use audio transcription tools. If you do phone interviews, transcription tools can save you a lot of time. However, this depends on how accurate you need the transcription to be, how long your interviews are, and whether you will be using the entire interview or only part of it.
Embrace grammar and spell-checking tools. If you are a health writer, you most likely know how to write well. But having a tool flag spelling or grammar errors can save time, and catch errors that you may miss when you are editing while tired.
Use a project management system. Writing health articles, especially if you work for multiple publications or clients, means keeping track of many tasks. You can do this on paper, but there are many project management tools that will help you do it more efficiently, such as Trello, Asana, and mind mapping software. The key is to find something that fits your workflow.
Conclusion
By writing faster, you can not only create more content, but you will also have more time to focus on creating interesting and high-quality content.
The steps outlined above are especially useful for beginning writers, who are still settling into their writing routine. But I’ve been writing health articles for over 10 years and still find ways to improve how I write.
The key is to work mindfully — noticing which tasks seem to take up too much of your time. A regular weekly or monthly check-in is also a good time to look at how smoothly your writing processes are running.
With continued refinement, you will be on your way to writing great health content in record time.
Where have you been able to save the most time in your writing workflow? What methods do you use to write faster? Where are you still struggling to work efficiently?
