Though people think my job is making YouTube videos, most of my working time is actually spent writing.

When I think about how to work better or faster, it's all about improving the writing process. I read a lot of books about writing because that's where 90% of the benefits and 90% of the bottlenecks of my working life reside.

I've been doing this long enough to have developed a rough process of my own and I'm comfortable enough to let you, dear reader, in. If you want to see this messy process of mine, this article is for you.

Now, I'm not actually a good writer, I'm a competent writer. This isn't false modesty: competence, it turns out, is depressingly rare as is.

But where I excel is iteration. Re-writing and re-writing.

If you want to be a better writer but, like me, you know you're not actually great at it, I suggest you try iterating a short piece of work, over and over.

How many iterations?

As best I can tell, going back through all my files, writing the script for this video took somewhere between 30 drafts at a minimum to 50 drafts at a maximum.