I went for a walk this morning before starting work, and as I was stepping out onto the sunny street, I felt a flash of guilt.
“You won’t amount to much this way,” I heard a disembodied but familiar voice say to me.
I shrugged it off. I told myself that I was doing the right thing for me. Still, for a moment, that voice, and that tiny cloud of guilt covered up the Barcelona morning sun.
The voice belonged to marketer, copywriter, and prolific content machine Dan Kennedy, who was speaking somewhere in my head.
Dan’s voice was talking to me because I’d gotten up around 7:45am, it was now around 8:30am, and I was going out for a walk, which meant I wouldn’t get back to the apartment and to work before 9:15am.
On the other hand, as that disembodied voice reminded me, Dan trained himself to get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, and shuffle to his writing desk, all within 15 mins.
That’s one part of why Dan has been able to write dozens of books, hundreds of newsletters, thousands of “Weekly faxes” and probably millions of words of sales copy to promote his own business and the businesses of the wagonfuls of clients he has worked with — all finished each day before 4pm.
Like I say, skipping a morning walk and getting to work right away is one part of why Dan has been able to do so much. But thankfully, it’s not the only part.
Dan once said that he wrote his No B.S. Time Management book in a weekend — Saturday, Sunday, and a bit of Monday.
244 pages… fifteen chapters… hundreds of personal stories, business case studies, metaphors and analogies… all done in two-and-a half days.
How?
Turns out Dan had most of the stuff already written, either as rough chunks of content, or as stories he had used earlier, or as elements from other books, newsletters, and faxes. But not only that.
He had all this stuff organized in boxes with labels on them. I don’t know the specifics of Dan’s boxing and labeling system. It doesn’t particularly matter, since I don’t work mainly on my laptop, and I want stuff I can search and store digitally.
What does matter is that Dan’s boxes of content, and the labels on those boxes, allowed him to pull out all this material on Saturday morning… look over it… glue it all together… tweak some transitions here and there… and produce a book by Monday afternoon.
And not just any book. A career-defining book. A book that’s gone on to sell tens of thousands of copies, that has led to millions in client and product sales, and that has become Dan’s most influential, and cult-building book, if Amazon reviews are anything to go by.
It might sounds impossible, but you can do this too.
It won’t be automatic, and it will take time and work. But if you’ve decided that writing is for you, that you want to influence people, that you want to make good money doing so, then this kind of organization — whether you use a system of text files or a bunch of cardboard boxes — can make you drastically more productive. Miraculously so.
I’ve been crowing about my Insight Exposed system for the past few days, because it can help you get to this level of organization more quickly than you might do otherwise.
Insight Exposed lays out my own system for labeling, organizing, retrieving, and gluing together ingredients for written content and sales copy. There are no cardboard boxes and no post-it notes in my system. It’s all digital, but you can adapt it to whatever “technology” you like.
Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in it, you can sign up for my list here.