How to Speed Up Deamand Studios Productivity

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Step 1

Chose your titles wisely. A lot of writers make the mistake of choosing interesting or fun articles, and that's fine if you're an expert in that subject area, but it means lingering on research if you're not. Stick to the titles you can write quickly with little research.
Step 2

Pick a title and if you don't already have references in mind, do a quick Google search. If you can't find all the references you need to write the article in 1-2 minutes, move on. If you do find good references, claim the title, open it, and copy the links you found into the reference section. Now you have a researched title. Save the article and move on until your queue is full of researched articles.
Step 3

Start at the top and write the introduction for each article, saving it after you're done. Add title headings or other quick notes if you want, but do not write the article body yet. Save it and move on, completing the introductions for each title in your queue. Practice equals speed, and you want to get to the point where you spend no more than 5 minutes per introduction.
Step 4

Open your first article in one Firefox tab. Open your research sources in other tabs. I recommend using a Firefox plug-in like Split Tabs to keep everything open and visible at one time. This saves you from having to flip between tabs while you read your research and write your article. Everything is right in front of you. Tab Sidebar and Thumbstrips are also useful to some writers for organizing research.
Step 5

Install a Firefox plug-in called Lazarus. Lazarus saves information that you enter into forms. Writing articles in word processing software, then copying and pasting them into the templates wastes time. With Lazarus, if you lose your work to the "no permissions" glitch, Lazarus will recover it.
Step 6

Write your article body. This is a quick but thoughtful draft that addresses the title, uses the reference materials wisely and follows the style guidelines. Try to complete the article body in 15-30 minutes. You will get faster with practice. Save it, but do not submit it. Do this until you have the article bodies for all your articles completed.
Step 7

Open each article and give it a 5 minute copy edit. If you've written a sound article, use that 5 minutes to find a picture, or move on to the next article. You are not required to include pictures in your articles at this time. This is a personal choice, but I find it adds another 10 minutes per article, easy, which can cost me more than two hours of work. When you're confident you've written a sound piece, submit!
Step 8

Don't rush. You're practicing to increase your speed, however, it's never a good idea to turn in a sloppy article that doesn't meet the needs of the title or DS's quality standards. You're a professional. If one article body takes you 15 minutes and the next takes you an hour, that's fine. It happens to everyone. The idea is to get organized and get a system in place that uses your time as effectively as possible. I find that keeping myself moving from one small task to the next, rather than trying to take on an assignment all at once greatly increases my productivity. If you're experiencing too many re-writes or rejections, slow down.
Step 9

Build a collection of references as you go along. Create a bookmarks tab, and whenever you find a reference site that you think will be useful to you in the future, add it to a bookmarks folder for DS research. That way you can pres Ctrl + B to display a sidebar list of all your reference sites. This is handy while choosing titles.
Step 10

Search smarter. Weed through a lot of junk in Google by using some search tricks. If you'd like to do a search for allergy symptoms in Google and want only education website results, type (without quotes) "allergy symptoms site:.edu" into Google. This will only return educational sites. For organizations, type (without quotes) "allergy symptoms site:.org" This works for any extension, such as .net, .gov, etc. Google Scholar and Google Book Search are also great ways to find references.
Step 11

Add it all up. Keep track of the time you spent on each article in the beginning just to track your progress. A 2.5 minute title search with a 2.5 minute references search, a 5 minute introduction, a 15 minute article body and a 5 minute copy edit equals a 30 minute title. If you're an expert, already have well bookmarked references and a good grasp of your research and have titles with similar topics*, you can easily get this number in half. (*Similar topics must be written as new articles from different and fresh perspectives. No cut, rewrite and pastes allowed.)

Comments

leduncan said

on 10/13/2009 Whew! Great article, very motivating indeed! I don't know if I can switch back and forth between articles like that, but I may give that a shot with articles that have similar titles. Great research tips!