The Inner Monologue

One of the most common questions I get is some variation of:
How do you write so much?

It’s a fair question. By the numbers, it looks a little absurd. Over the past 261 days, I’ve published 759 posts. Do the math and you land just shy of three posts per day. To an outside observer, that smells like obsession, discipline, or some kind of caffeinated superpower.

The truth is far less flattering and far more useful:

I am not prolific.
I am inconsistent.

We tend to imagine writers as machines that wake up every morning, sit down at a desk, and reliably convert coffee into finished work at a steady rate. That image is comforting because it suggests a formula: find the right routine, the right tool, the right mindset, and productivity will follow.

But that’s not how my writing works.

What I do consistently is write.
What I do inconsistently is post.

Those two activities get conflated, especially in the age of feeds, dashboards, and daily streaks. But they are not the same thing. Writing is a cognitive act. Posting is an editorial and logistical one. I am far better at the first than the second.

Because of that mismatch, my output doesn’t arrive in neat daily parcels. Some days, only one post goes live. Other days, ten appear in rapid succession, as if I woke up possessed by some manic muse. That impression is misleading. Those ten posts were not written that day. They were written earlier—sometimes much earlier—during stretches of momentum when ideas were coming faster than I could reasonably publish them.

Writing three posts in a day is an accomplishment.
Writing ten posts in a day would be heroic.

And I am not heroic.

What I am is someone who writes when the thinking is hot and posts when the backlog demands it. The apparent volume is an artifact of batching, not of daily feats of endurance.

This matters because we are terrible, culturally, at distinguishing between rate and rhythm.

We look at totals and assume consistency. We look at bursts and assume intensity. We see a flood of posts and imagine someone grinding late into the night, white-knuckling their way through a self-imposed quota. In reality, what you’re often seeing is the delayed release of work that was written during uneven, human cycles of curiosity and attention.

The myth of the prolific creator is appealing because it flatters our sense of order. It suggests that output is a function of discipline alone. If someone else can do it, then surely we could too—if only we tried harder, optimized better, or sacrificed more.

But most creative work doesn’t happen that way.

Ideas arrive in clusters. Insight has tides. Some days your mind is a factory; other days it’s a loading dock with nothing coming in. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make the work better—it just makes people feel broken when their own rhythms don’t match the fantasy.

My process is messy, lumpy, and occasionally embarrassing. I write fragments. I write half-formed arguments. I write things that sit untouched for weeks. Then, suddenly, I realize I’ve accumulated enough material to publish several pieces at once. When I do, it looks like excess. It looks like abundance. It looks like I’ve cracked some secret code.

I haven’t.

I’ve just stopped pretending that creativity should arrive on a schedule.

So yes, the numbers are real.
Yes, three posts per day is something to be proud of.
And yes, if you think what I’m doing looks heroic—thank you.

But the more accurate story is simpler and more human: I write often, I post irregularly, and sometimes the math creates an illusion of superhuman output.

It’s not productivity hacking.
It’s not discipline theater.
It’s not a miracle.

It’s just a backlog—and the freedom to let ideas arrive when they’re ready.