Nano Compound Writing: A Writing Framework for Busy Creators

You may have only short chunks of time during your day to do creative work.

You can’t sit for 2 hours of deep focused work as all the productivity gurus tell you to do.

It just can’t fit into your day. I know it usually doesn’t in mine.

So what can we do to keep being productive while working in small chunks and being interrupted often?

I have been thinking about this problem this week. With a newborn at home and a full-time job, how can I still manage to write or create anything?

Not easy…

But while learning how to use my new favourite note-taking/productivity app, Tana, I stumbled on a video talking about interstitial journaling.

And it clicked.

Why not use this idea for other types of writing? Nothing against journaling, it’s a great habit for developing self-awareness and mindfulness.

But as creators, we want to write other stuff. From blog posts to video scripts, or atomic essays.

Here is my take on what I call “nano writing”.

The concept is simple.

You take your creative project or at least its written part (thus the script for a video or screenplay), and you break it down into small parts.

Meaning that you need to write a detailed outline (we’ll see later how crucial this word is).

This should already be what you do, so nothing new here.

The idea that you may not have exploited so far is to break it down into atomic/nano chunks.

Something as small as a sentence. Or a sequence of words.

Something you can write very quickly. In seconds or minutes at maximum.

Then, you write the next one. And the next one.

Your nano creative/writing sessions will compound over the day and the week. You will end up with a full draft before you know it.

nano-writing + compound interest = long-form quality content.

The best is that it builds up very naturally.

You don’t feel overwhelmed because the effort is so small that your survival brain won’t be triggered and send you to eat chocolate or watch TV (or both!).

This part of your brain hates effort that doesn’t bring immediate rewards. It is the source of procrastination.

Also, you don’t lose time thinking about what to write. It is a very focused session on a particular and small aspect of your project.

Now you may be wondering how to do that in practice.

Because when you have a whole page of text, even structured with an outline, your attention will be drawn to other parts of your writing. Your brain will want to edit or add something to an existing part.

I have a trick.

The essence of nano-writing (or compound writing or interstitial writing if you prefer) is to focus on a tiny bite.

And to be able to switch to writing mode in a few seconds.

Context switching is a productivity killer, so we want to reduce it.

As I said before, it is very difficult when you come back to a Google doc or Word document already filled (or worse, blank).

The solution is to use a special format for your writing. And a special tool dedicated to that.

This tool is an outliner.

I discovered this category of note-taking tools about 2 years ago and it blew my mind!

It is impressively efficient for brainstorming and structuring quickly your thoughts.

Here is what it looks like:

This is the tool I used to outline and draft what you’re reading now is Dynalist.

You may not know it, but it is similar to Workflowy and has been developed by the creators of Obsidian (well, they created Dynalist first, then Obsidian).

I highly recommend you give it a try.

It’s free and easy to use (there is a paid plan that I don’t use and you probably won’t need it).

If you never used an outliner before, be prepared for something wild 😅 (but in a good way!).

Anyway…

One important aspect of using an outliner for nano writing is that you can work on a single bullet point (also called a “node” depending on the software) at a time.

“I’ve used bullet points for years, what’s so new here?” you might think.

The killer feature is that you can zoom in on a bullet point.

This means that you can have a total visual focus on a particular point of your writing.

Here is how it looks using the previous example:

Nothing to distract you.

You can go full-on with your nano writing session and forget about everything else.

But this point is in context (see the breadcrumb on top of the image). You can see in seconds where you are and which ideas it is related to.

That’s powerful I tell you.

And you can’t do that with other apps such as Notion (or you have to create a new subpage for each point 😅).

So that’s how nano writing works:

1. Choose an outliner app (highly recommended).

2. Create an outline of your project

3. Zoom in on a single point

4. Write fast

5. Repeat with the next point when you get 5 minutes

This will allow you to work in tiny chunks if you can’t get longer writing sessions.

And by a natural compound effect, you will produce more than you would think.

I am still experimenting but I’d love to get your feedback on that. Try it and let me know how it goes!

Be great,

Frank