Value Versus Effort: How Much Time to Write a Blog Post?

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

An increasingly furious blizzard of emails and articles informs me that I take much too long to produce an article. I should be cranking out articles by the truck load. 30 minutes, an hour max… per article.

I have to call BS on that.

Sure, there’s times (like right now) when I can snap out an article in a few minutes. You have noticed this capability yourself I’m sure.

When everything just flows, right out of your fingers, into the keyboard, across the “interwebs” and onto your blog.

Nothing could be simpler.

But then… there’s other times when…

…writing is like pulling teeth…

…painful. Messy. Bloody!

Like the article I have gestating on a simple, portable, self-contained unit testing framework in pure C, with a version in C++ for comparison. I’ve got a few hours work in it already. But there’s no way it’s close to being done!

Cripes, just making sure the Makefile works correctly will take an hour. At least.

Or the article on debugging WordPress plugins using FirePHP plugin for Firebug (a Firefox extension). Writing 500 a word article will take 40 hours of learning curve. There is no way I could provide real value to any reader without spending that time.

The C/C++ unit testing article will get traffic, just as all my other articles on C programming get the majority of traffic on There Is NO Box. In contrast, rapidly written articles on inspiration and productivity get almost no traffic at all (I write them for my own use.).

Same with the FirePHP article. It will get traffic because there is a lot of people developing WordPress plugins – and few writing on how to debug WordPress plugins.

The upshot of all these assertions about cutting one’s writing time by huge percentages is this:

1. If you are writing from a purely emotional basis where facts are irrelevant, or not important, or at the least disputable (for example, my assertions above), yes, it’s possible to snap out articles as fast as your little hippocampus or amygdyla or whatever can drive your fingers.
2. If instead, your articles have to be factually correct… the first time you have to look something up either on line… you’re in for an hour. At least. The more verifiable facts, the longer it will take the article.
3. However, if you’re an absolute domain expert, you may well be able to crank out dozens of articles really fast. There’s always a counter-example, and right before this article published, Extreme John pops up with a claim of writing 73 articles in 24 hours… on the tanning salon business! Since John has been in the tanning salon business for years… this makes perfect sense. (It would take me all day to 1 article on tanning salons.)
4. If blogging is your art form… abandon all hope! Ok, it’s not that bad… but each level of detail and refinement you incorporate takes time to master. 90% of the work can be done in 10% of the time. That last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

   Here’s a quick offer: first person who correctly notes the latest refinement on Website In A Weekend blog posts gets an hour consulting, topic of your choice pulled from here, or we’ll go over any blog post you want, in extreme detail. (Offer expires Midnight October 30th, 2009.).

Value versus Effort

My rule of thumb:

Value and effort correspond.

The word is suggestive: “Co – respond.” The more effort, the higher the value.

For example, consider the very long articles published by Tim Ferriss and Steve Pavlina. These are high effort affairs, requiring serious commitment – from the reader as well as the author. And both authors draw considerable attention for their pains. Interestingly, neither post daily.

Here’s another very interesting factoid: this article was drawn from an article originally published on There Is No Box. “How long should it take to write a blog post?” was written in about 10 minutes, a reaction to yet another marketing email telling me I was wasting my time writing long articles.

That article didn’t get a lot of traction (I’m not really promoting There Is No Box).

If you have a minute, compare the two articles. Which took longer to write? Which has more value? Which will get more readers? Coincidence? Not hardly.

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Tagged as: Inspiration, Productivity, Writing