I write a lot. I’ve finished just shy of 150 articles so far this year between Lifehacker, PopSci, WIRED, and PCMag, an average of 25 articles a month. I love it.
The best part of being a freelancer, to me, is that I don’t have to do anything but write. Yes, there is a little bit of admin—I need to send and track invoices, and the taxes aren’t fun. But there’s no managers, no meetings, and no company vision boards. I pitch articles, I write the ones that are approved, and after a few edits I get paid. It works for me.
So what’s the hard part? Ideas. To write around six articles a week, I need six article ideas every week, and that’s not easy. So I thought I’d talk a bit about my process, for two reasons. First: I personally find learning about other people’s workflows fascinating and think others might be interested in mine. Also, though, I think most people could benefit from curating their own internet instead of doomscrolling, and maybe my workflow could inspire you to build something similar.
I write a few different kinds of articles. For PCMag I tend to write reviews, which are assigned to me. I like this because I don’t have to think up an idea. For PopSci, lately I tend to write science explainers. I mostly come up with those ideas because I’m curious about something, end up reading a few scientific papers, and eventually end up with a document called coffee myths debunked by science on my computer.
But the most common articles I write, which I publish on both Lifehacker and WIRED, are tech tutorials or profiles of specific applications. These aren’t news articles, really. I’m trying to find tools that solve specific problems so that I can highlight them. Finding these sorts of article ideas take up a lot of my time in any given week. I’m constantly looking for applications worth profiling or problems that need a documented solution.
I have a morning routine for this, in which I read as broad a selection of technology news and recommendations as possible. I have an RSS reader in which I subscribe to a wide selection of tech blogs and other interesting publications. Many are well-known publications but I get some of my best ideas from lesser-known blogs like the excellent AppAddict. I supplement this by visiting a few websites directly every morning—Techmeme, Github’s Trending Repositories page, and a collection of Reddit pages that I’ve built over time. Between all of these I generally find a few applications or tools worth profiling every day, which I save in a Mac application called Gladys.
I should re-iterate that I’m not looking for breaking news, or things I have a take about. I’m looking for tools that I think seem useful, and that readers might potentially find useful. I clip the ones that intrigue me. Then, once a week, I review everything I’ve saved there and turn the ones I still think are good into one-paragraph pitches, complete with a potential headline, that I send to the various editors I work with. If one editor doesn’t want a piece, I’ll pitch it to another one.
I’ve done some version of this workflow for the past decade and a half. I start every week thinking I won’t be able to find six more things worth writing about and generally end the week having written six things. It works for me.
I’m curious about other people’s workflows, though. What’s something you do every day, or every week, that makes your job possible? I’d love to hear from you.
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