Warming Up Is Key

One of the things I have found while doing some writing is that it’s hard to go from just sitting there on your laptop into a flow state. The reason it’s difficult to make that transition is because it’s difficult to actually start.

This is the same with anything. I talk about warming up being critical in a lot of different stuff such as lifting weights or stretching, why would writing be any different?

A trick I picked up to increase your chances of starting and getting some momentum is to warm up by writing something completely unimportant. What this does is it tricks your brain into being much more ok with starting. If it’s not as important to write, there’s a lower barrier to starting. Normally I’d suggest doing the most important thing that you need to accomplish for the day first. Just do that one important thing after a small warmup. Easy as that.

How to warm up

Warming up in writing is the same as anything else, do the same activity at a less strenuous pace or less of a load. The way to do this with writing is to write something that isn’t as important to you and something that you don’t care if people see or not. The point of this writing warm up is to just get your fingers moving. Once they start moving, you can easily use that to just keep going.

3 Easy ways to warm up

There’s a couple methods that I use to warm up. Each way has it’s pros and cons, but ultimately I’m just using it to get moving.

• Daily Journal – The easiest method is to just start writing your random thoughts for the day in a journal every day. Try to take your mind out of it as much as possible and just write. Don’t judge what you are writing too much as this is meant as an exercise to just vomit thoughts. Eventually you’ll start seeing that this not only helps you to warm up, but to become a better writer as well. You could go a couple different routes here. For years I used a text file to do this. Then I started using an actual notebook just to make it more official. Either way this works great.
• Start copying word for word – Get out some kind of writing and just start copying it word for word. I’ll do this in a text file from time to time to get moving. You aren’t actually going to use this for anything other than warming up, but it could have an interesting secondary benefit. If you use as your example a writer that is better than you, you could start becoming a better writer yourself by adopting some of their style. This becomes especially interesting when you start trying to write copy. Writing good copy can be pretty lucrative, so getting better at this could allow you to sell your copywriting skills and also sell your own stuff better.
• Use a Tier 3 Blog – I picked up on this idea initially from internet villain Matt Forney.  Matt operates a popular blog and talked about getting an idea of what your readers want by writing a Tier 3 blog first. He advocates writing whatever you want, then using whatever gets the most traffic as a springboard to make a new blog. The idea of a Tier 3 blog also allows you to hone your writing skills and to warm up each day by posting stuff you think of that may or may not be associated with your main blog’s niche. It’s a pretty great idea and I back it. This will include starting another blog to mess around on. You may just want to do a free wordpress or blogger blog here as it’s not really important that anyone sees your thoughts. I already had a blog that I didn’t use that much from back in the day so I use that.

Conclusion

Warming up is as easy as taking out your notebook and writing for a few minutes. I’ve noticed that this has increased my productivity a lot for my own writing. If you are doing something besides writing, just take that activity and tone it down. Do that for a couple minutes before jumping into your real work

You could literally do this for anything

• Picking up chicks? Talk to everyone around you regardless of their sex to get your conversation flowing
• Bench pressing? Do a couple reps with just the bar to get your form down.
• Running an e-commerce store? Try calling a few suppliers just to shoot the shit. You could also call a few suppliers of products you have no business in to get the conversation correct.

Warming up works.  Give it a try.

-Tate

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