Effectivity

My Article Writing Template - Effectivity in Action

Effectivity is simply effective productivity.  It demands that you know exactly what you want to achieve and only then can you be effective in productively pursuing this goal. This is contrasted to ineffectivity, which is the process of productively pursuing actions which are not effective in carrying you to your goals.  In the past I have often been guilty of ineffectivity.  

I’ve been blogging since December 2006, although this particular site is still very young.  Over the past 8 months my aim has been to thoroughly enjoy writing articles for as many people as possible.  Unfortunately, the reality, has been a combination of success and failure in an unpredictable and often unintelligible blogging mess. 

I found that I would sit down and bash away at the keyboard, rapidly churning out 1000 words that were neither easy to read or easy to understand.  I always had something useful to say, but often it was so disguised in bad writing that my readers would have to work very hard to get value from their time spent reading. 

Those were the bad old days.  Today, my writing is a lot more organised.  I haven’t mastered the art of writing yet, but believe me, I have improved a lot.  Much of this improvement happened over night when I put effectivity to work and started using Article Templates as a form of pre-writing my articles.

The first step was for me to discover that my primary goal was to write articles that changed peoples lives.  These articles would have to be clear, concise and practical if I wanted them to be useful in any life changing way, so I decided that my old writing productivity was no longer adequate.  I had to develop a new effectivity tool that would help me to be effective in my productivity.  I call this tool an Article Template.

My Article Template is simply a long cardboard strip that I devised as a tool to organize my writing.  I sit my Article Template beside a page of ordinary lined A4 paper and simply answer the questions that my Template asks.  These answers then become the outline or backbone of the article that I subsequently write.  These are the type of questions that my Article Template asks:

1. How many words will it take me to make my point?
2. What site is the article written for?
3.  What category will the article fit in?
4. What is the main point that I want people to walk away with?
5. What is the problem that my main point addresses?
6. What is a good illustration to explain this point?
7. What are the topic sentences for each paragraph.

After I write out this outline, my template asks me the following check-up questions:

1. What will this article reveal about me and my journey in self development?
2. Is the application clear?
3. Is it practical?
4. Is there a comment question?
5. Is the main point written in a “take away” form?
6. Does the article motivate and encourage action right now?
7. Is there research that I need to do before finally writing the article?

I have found that using my Article Template, I am able to write my article outline in about 10 minutes.  This 10 minutes saves me about half an hour of re-arranging and editing a badly written article on the screen, and at the end of the process I believe that my articles are twice as succinct and valuable to my readers. 

This is a very simple application of effectivity at work.  I knew what I wanted to achieve and I found an incredibly effective way to achieve it productively.  If only the rest of life could be this simple…. but maybe it is if we find the right tools?

If you have any questions about my template or how to use it please feel free to drop a comment here.

Thanks

Tom