Where the Time Actually Goes
This is a member-only chapter. Log in with your Signal Over Noise membership email to continue.
Log in to readModule 1 · Section 2 of 5
Where the Time Actually Goes
Most people think writing is the bottleneck. It’s not.
The draft itself — the actual act of writing — takes maybe forty-five minutes for a thousand-word issue once you know what you want to say. The rest is everything around it:
Research takes an hour, minimum. Finding three or four credible sources, reading them, pulling out what’s actually useful, not just the quotes that sound good. Skipping this step produces shallow issues that readers can tell are shallow.
Structure takes another fifteen minutes. What’s the argument? What order do the sections go in? Does the opening hook actually hook? This is where most drafts go wrong — not the writing, but the skeleton under it.
Review is where people consistently underestimate. Reading it again the next day, cutting the parts that felt good to write but don’t serve the reader, fixing the sentences that made sense in your head but not on paper. A proper edit pass takes thirty to forty minutes and the draft is always better for it.
Formatting and sending adds another twenty minutes — copy into Kit.com’s editor, check that the formatting survived, write the preview text, double-check the subject line, schedule or send.
Add it up and you’re at three to four hours for a decent issue, five if the research is genuinely complex.