1. Learn what you know.
   What do you really know about the topic? You might know more than you think. Writing down your knowledge in point form (or in a brainstormed mind map) helps you to learn what you already know. This makes it easier to decide what you still have to learn.

2. Learn what you don’t know (i.e., decide what to learn).
   When I was in my twenties and wanted to be an actor, I started studying Lee Strasberg’s method acting by “living” a role to the best of my ability. I try to do the analogue with writing, when possible, especially on topics I’ll be writing about regularly. Now, maybe you don’t need to be an expert, but do you know what you need to learn for your immediate purposes? Whether you’re writing an article, a blog post, a term paper, a technical manual or just learning, decide on the scope of your learning. For example, if you’re learning a highly technical subject, you may need to prep your mind by browsing and surfing relevant websites before the actual learning. This task should be part of your scope as well.

3. Map out your project plan.
   No matter how little you have to learn, it’s still a project, and (mind)mapping what your tasks are makes them concrete in your mind. This plan should be an extension of the scope you determined in the last step. If your learning is going to be over a long-term, and/or if you will be learning multiple topics, a project plan just helps you balance everything without feeling overwhelmed. (I’ll get into more detail about using mindmapping to develop a project plan in the future.)

4. Choose your references.
   Now you’re implementing your project plan. One step should be to choose some references. If you have access to a suitable library, go for it. If not, use a good search engine online and bookmark some suitable references in your web browser. Be as thorough as you need to be, as these will be the soure of your new knowledge.

5. Summarize each reference.
   After selecting your references, read and summarize them fast. I’ll have a separate post in near the future on how to do this using mind maps. Basically, summarize each reference in a few articles. Make your own Cliff Notes, so to speak. For each paragraph in each reference, write only one or two sentences of summary. Stop yourself from going beyond that, and don’t edit your summaries. (You can always go back and re-read if you felt you missed something.)

6. Rewrite your summaries.
   To concretize your new knowledge, take your summaries for all references as a whole and write a short blog post or article, regardless of why you’re learning. Make sure that you use your own words. To insure that, try writing without looking at your summaries, if possible. This is the last and most important step.

I’ll try to expand on each step in separate posts in the near future. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment.

There are so many theories and claims out there about the human ability to multi-task or not, and I thought I’d put my thoughts out there. I’ve been a multi-tasker for at least 20 years, if not longer. Though there’s a right way to go about it, and it requires both organization and discipline. I have loads of the former but I struggle with the latter.

Instead of babbling theoretically, let me give you a concrete example. (My posts tend to be long and detailed, but I’ll try to be brief this time.) As of this month, if I can manage the workload, I know have enough writing/ blogging contracts to consider myself a full-time professional freelance writer and blogger. My own sites’ revenue is tiny, but that’s another story. Here’s the breakdown of my workload, in general terms:

• 13 blog posts daily for 5 blogs (shrunk from 7), on weekdays. [Though I I actually post them any day of the week that's suitable.]

• 1-3 large articles weekly. Fixed deadlines, research- intensive, potentially-stressful work because there’s a lot at stake. Retainer work for the foreseeable future.

My work is anonymous, so I’m not giving example links. If you know me, you already know where to find me. But let’s start with the blog posts. I’m now focusing on two topics, shrunk down last month from three. I needed to revise my daily writing focus because for every topic I wrote about, I had to do a minimum amount of reading/ scanning everyday, including weekends, just to keep up. Now, with two topics only, my aim is laser-focused.

The fact is, I can spend, say, 2 hours each day reading one topic and 1 hr for the other one. It usually ends up being an average of 4 hrs/day total because I cross- pollinate my interests by reading other blogs that are related to my topics but not focused.

Regardless, for the amount of reading I do, I can write one post or I can write ten for that reading session. I try to read the night before, write a bit of possible, then continue reading in the morning. Post ideas have usually brewed in my head overnight. While some people might call that “sleeping on it”, it’s actually a form of multi-tasking that takes very little effort. When I don’t do any reading the night before, the next day’s writing usually is very functional and technical, not as entertaining. [Though that's not to say every post has to be entertaining.]

And then there are the weekly articles I write. While they don’t pay as much as a print article might for the same amount of output, they still pay well. What’s more, I’m on retainer with them. For the foreseeable future, I have at least 2 every week. That means guaranteed income and some peace of mind as a freelancer. (Despite the stress of the actual work.)

The problem is that they are research-intensive, with topics that are sometimes new to me. If I don’t plan well, I sometimes end up working for $6/hr or less. On the other hand, if I apply multi-tasking at its best, I could make $30/hr on some (not all) of these articles.

So what do I need to do to maximize my hourly earnings potential? Answer: multi-task properly. What does this entail? Here is a short task list of my methodology:

• Day 1:

• Scope out the problem. Understand what the client needs.

• Write up my genral task list for a given article. I apply project management principles here, which I was partly trained in back in the corporate world in the late 1990s.

• Build a mindmap of all the elements of the project that I’ll need to address, including each section to be written and references I need to read and link to.

• Take a short break, maybe work on something else.

• Spend one hour scanning (not reading) some of the references I’ve been given, as well as building up a list of additional references.

• My mind has had at least an overnight period to absorb what needs to be done, in general. I may not yet have an “angle” for the article. However, I go the metaphysical route with this, due to long experience in writing, and let the angle present itself to me. I never force it. But if I don’t do Day 1’s scoping immediately, I cannot meet my tight deadlines of 7 days or less for each weekly article. If I have details 3 weeks beforehand, then I start scoping then.

• Spend an hour or two browsing and/or reading a few references from my list, just to be sure to prep my mind for acquiring knowledge about the topic.
• Cull the reference list, if possible.

• Depending on when I had details of an assignment, it may be weeks or up to two months before I actually start on a particular article. I have some articles that I’ve set researchers to working on for me three months ahead of time.

• In the meantime, multi-tasking has kicked in. While I’ve been working on other articles and on the blogs, the “background processes” in my mind have been quietly flagging any information I come upon in relation to the project at hand.

• So when I actually reading and making notes, I often find that each section of the article “writes itself” in my head, and I merely have to type it out, then add hyperlinks to supporting references.

• This is what I mean by multi-tasking. Let the background processes in your head work for you by feeding them info early. Now move on to other work in the meantime.
• However, if the article has not yet formed in my head by Day R1, I start reading indepth, taking notes, etc.
• I then write up a draft and let it “sit” overnight.
• This is followed up by an edit to both tighten the writing, add any unlinked references, and get the word count right.

Now, I’ve given “blogging” as an application of this form of multi-tasking. However, you can apply similar methods for any discipline where you have to juggle a lot of tasks that require a great deal of thought and/or research. I use a combination of mindmapping, learning methods, and project management (PM) because it works for me. Without the PM, I’d be a basket case, due to my workload.

The success of my version of multi-tasking for writing is faith- based. I stumbled upon this technique over the years, and it never fails me. Provided I actually trust it and have the discipline to use it. And that’s the hardest part for me.

While it’s well-known that you cannot copyright a general idea or a topic, crediting ideas is a professional courtesy, especially when you are presenting something that’s not really yours. Courtesy goes a long way online. If you understand the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, you’ll know why I say this.

Six degrees of separation is the concept that any two people on Earth are separated in knowledge of each other by at most six intermediaries. Although some definitions of this concept say five intermediaries, in my math research, I’ve only seen “six” mentioned, and it’s the definition of always used. I mean, wouldn’t it be called Five Degrees then?

Six degrees is an extremely important sociological concept, and has mutated into the related “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” Hollywood connections game. That in turn led to the idea of a Bacon number. (Go ahead; have some fun and calculate your Bacon number, if you’ve been in a feature film. I’ve been a background actor in a few movies, including Back to the Future with Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, who both have a Bacon number of 2. If I had actually acted in the movie, instead of just appearing in the background, my Bacon number would be 3.)

If you go on pure Six Degrees, though, I can connect myself to a lot of celebrities, especially in the music biz, within 3 degrees or less. So what, right? Well, besides showing off, I actually have a point: You’d be surprised who you are connected to. And that applies in the blogosphere. A smile and link-love go a long way online, and not just because of Six Degrees.

But that said, I have to ashamedly admit that I don’t always credit the sources of my ideas. Not often, but sometimes.

Why not? It’s certainly not due to any malice or jealousy or what have you.  It’s purely due to inefficient methods of recording both new ideas and their sources. I use a variety of software tools to research ideas for future posts, and sometimes that means I forget to record the inspiration.

So how to fix that? Discipline. That’s all I can think of. But failing that, if I personally ever present a new idea that you feel I plundered from your writing, feel free to tell. If it’s true, I’ll more than happily publish a credit/ link to you.

But let’s make a distinction between the above situation and another. Lately, in pressing hard in my research to break stories before some of the ultra-popular bloggers, I have managed to write something “first”. However, because I’m obsessed with editing, I sometimes post an hour or two later. A casual observer might think I stole the idea without attribution. While no one has accused me of that, I’ve been finding this situation occuring more frequently as of late.

The tool is Google Trends. As Darren and Steve illustrate, Trends can be used as a research tool, whether or not you are writing online. It helps you compare the popularity of 2-5 search terms, and does a demographic breakdown by city, region or language.

If you have a website that sells something, you might use the trend information to target content, products, ebooks, services, etc., by country of your visitor. If you are actually writing online, the trend information can help you determine how to narrow down your topic focus, whether or not you use a regional breakdown.

For example, the graph at right (click for larger version) shows a comparison between the terms “food”, “recipes” and “cooking”. According to the trend chart, during the last two years, the term “food” outdistances the other two terms for searches. What’s more, the “News volume” secondary chart shows that the term “food” showed up more often in Google News stories than the other terms.

You might conclude, then, that it may be more worthwhile to write about food in general than just cooking or recipes. Of course, writing about all three topics might be even better. It might also be worthwhile to make sure that the titles of your online articles typically include one of those terms, to give yourself a better chance of being found.

You can also use Google Trends to help you decide between topics. In the chart at right, I’ve randomly compared 5 topics. It appears that of the 5 (technology, cars, jewelry, recipes, writing), the search term “cars” is more popular. However, cars has a lower News Volume than both technology and food. While this only means that Google news pieces did not mention “cars” as often, it might also mean that there are less articles on the Internet about cars than for the other topics.

It’s not a definitive conclusion, but this might mean that it could be more lucrative to write about cars, since there is a dearth of such articles. Had there been more car articles, relatively speaking, that may mean there’s too much competition for your articles against other sites, and it might be best to stay away from that topic. Ultimately, if you want to write about cars, your should probably do so anyway, but if you plan to earn a living doing so, you may want to leverage your online articles to land print articles. For most writers, print still pays far better than anywhere on the Internet, including your own site.

The best part about Trends is that it shows you seasonal fluctuations as well. Some topics are bound to be more popular during certain times of year. To maximize your readership of articles about such topics, you want to write them AND post them in advance, to give search engines time to index them. For this reason, many top bloggers say that you need to start preparing for the Xmas season several months in advance. It’s the same reason why Olympics bloggers start their websites a couple of years before the event.

What Google Trends does not show you is the actual volume of searches for each term. Nevertheless, Trends should prove to be a valuable tool for writing and research, especially for websites and weblogs.

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