A few days ago, recently released Greek soldier GC Tsalamagkakis, who used to write code for CERN (the particle accelerator people) and now writes copy for ecom brands, posted an interesting question in my little Daily Email House community:
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A lot of times I find myself ready to write my daily email but not starting.
I have all these ideas in my head, I know how I wanna start and I have a brief idea on what it will look like on the middle and end.
But I don’t start immediately. Sometimes I catch myself thinking “I have to type aaaaall that now? It will take so much time 😒“
Or I might write a part of the email in a way that is more brief but also worse.
Now, it might be because I’m lazy or it might be because caffeine can hit me like a truck sometimes and thoughts are zooming too fast.
But either way, I believe that the faster I can type, the less friction will be between the thought and its materialization.
Have you ever thought about it?
What do you think?
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I never thought about typing speed — maybe because I’m a mediocre typist.
But I do agree with the underlying thought. I find it’s really important to write down ideas quickly. It’s a race against my own short-term memory to capture something that can turn out to be effective or useful before it disappears.
Over the years, I’ve hit upon a number of tricks to write down stuff quick, in spite of my mediocre typing speed:
1. absence of punctuation
2. absence of capitalization
– tricking myself with the “hyphen” trick, using a bunch of hyphens at the start of each line to make it feel like notes instead of proper sentences, so i just write it down instead of agonize over it
4. shorthand w/ lotsa abbrevs
5. placeholders for [sections that i’ll figure out later]
6. using abc in place of names i don’t know and xyz for figures that i’ll have to look up
7. stupid ideas that i will delete later
8. no editing if i make mistakes, i meant even if i make mistakes but whatever
9. phonetic spelling that’s good enuff
10. headings that i write down before i start writing to sketch out the general trend of what i want to say such as:
GC QUESTION
MY STRATEGIES FOR WRITING IDEAS DOWN FAST
OFFER
Speaking of offer:
My offer today would be Daily Email House, the lively community where the GC posted his question, and a number of other daily email writing marketers and business owners chimed in with their thoughts.
However, The House is not yet available as a “front-end” offer, but only as an upsell for those who sign up for my Daily Email Habit service.
Currently, I’m offering people a week’s trial on Daily Email house on me, but again, only if you sign up for Daily Email Habit.
For more info on that: