This article’s going to be all about the one thing that’s made me a better writer since starting to create on Medium at the start of the year.

You might have guessed by this point, but it was simply to wake up and write an article before I did any other work in the day.

I’m going to explain why this method of working is so effective. If there’s one piece of advice that you take from me ever, it’s this one — get your writing done first thing in the morning, and make a habit of it.

Let’s get started…

For the first three months of writing on Medium, I posted infrequently.

Three pieces in January, only one in February and three more in March.

This was when I didn’t have a schedule for writing. I just showed up when the motivation was high and tried to remember how articulating myself through text actually worked.

Moving into May, I gained more traction on Medium and started publishing more often. This was when the habit of writing first thing in the morning formed. I wrote better at that time of the day, so my writing got more engagement, motivating me to write even more.

The positive feedback loop started and has not yet stopped.

So what’s different about writing in the morning in comparison to any other time of the day?

Your mind is unadulterated with the day’s events and commitments, so you can focus more wholly on what you’re putting on the page. You haven’t checked your email or social media notifications yet, so there’s nothing to distract you there. In fact, you haven’t even turned your phone on.

As well as this, you’re actually scientifically better at writing in the morning. The REM sleep that dominates the most recent part of your slumber each morning builds creativity and inventiveness, so you’re better at thinking of unique and exciting ways to put yourself across in your work after you wake up as opposed to any other time of the day.

All of this added up to me being able to form a better writing habit.

This led to consistency, which is ultimately the number one driver of improvement when writing online.

The reason for this lies in the nature of how we improve our creative work. It’s not a question of creating something really high quality and spending loads of time polishing it, but only doing this infrequently, it’s a question of getting your best content out into the world as fast as possible and iterating on it based on the way that people respond.

You’re not trying to please yourself as much as you are your audience when you’re writing, so who’s to say if your work is good or not? You or them? Get your work in front of people and see how they react. It’s through this reaction, most often seen through engagement metrics, that you can make decisions on how to improve.

The person who spends hours polishing and stressing over word choice won’t be able to compete with someone who’s gone through five or six iterations of their work within the same time because learning happens through experience — you can be told what to do for the rest of time. Still, you won’t ever internalise this information unless you go and try it yourself. Failing’s good for progress, winning’s good for progress, but doing nothing won’t result in progress.

Once you’ve built this into a habit, you’ll become unstoppable.

No fancy superfood for breakfast, no morning sunlight, no cold showers.

These things are nice, but they only influence you. They come second to actually creating something that other people can experience learn from and put the contents into action.

This is the very best piece of advice I can give to anyone who’s just started out writing or struggling with the consistency of their work.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Simply act and react based on feedback.

Do the work.

I hope you’ve learned something new and actionable from this piece, and as always, thanks for reading!