Post

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

(To be fair here, I produce such a high volume of content that it's understandable when people evaluate my work based on a single post without taking the breadth of my coverage into account)

Juraj
@aksuno.bsky.social

I have to ask as I was wondering about it for a while - how do you manage to produce so much content? Like seriously. I would love to read a post about how you approach and research what’s new, what tool you made and use daily to consume all your feeds and sources. - 1/2

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Not having a full time employer helps! It's that and practice: I've been writing online for 20+ years now, so I can knock out a small piece (a link blog entry) in 5-15 minutes and most of my longer form stuff takes 1-2 hours

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

My review post of 2024 was an outlier, I didn't measure but I would guess that was at least four hours of writing and another accumulated two hours of jotting down notes for it over the previous few weeks

0 reposts15 likes

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Oh, I forgot to mention: lower your standards! Waiting until a piece feels as good as you can get it is a recipe for an empty blog and a huge folder full of drafts I try to hit publish while I am still unhappy with what I've written

M
@mick.bsky.social

Also helps to establish a fast workflow so you can minimise time from idea to published post. I know it’s held me back when I’ve had to log into CMS on desktop machine, forced to assign a category for every post, etc.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I used to try and wrap every post up with a neat conclusion... my writing productivity went up a whole lot when I gave myself permission to just stop writing when I had run out of things to say!

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Adding a summary or conclusion is great if you can think of a satisfying way to wrap up, as long as you can avoid procrastinating on hitting publish because you don't feel like the post has a good enough ending

Robert Atkins
@ratkins.net

Related: I had the very enlightening experience once of writing a blog post that went on for pages and pages exploring an argument, premise-body-conclusion school essay style. Then I looked at it, scrapped it and just said what I wanted to say in four paragraphs.

bbor
@robb.doering.ai

Check out the HBO south park documentary if you're bored sometime, it's short and pretty interesting even to non-viewers. Focuses on the era where they were turning out a 30 minute animated show every week, and the psychological toll of that for creators with high standards.