A blog post takes me 90 minutes from blank page to published. The trick is not typing speed — it is doing one job at a time instead of all four at once. Research, outline, draft and edit each need a different kind of attention, and every switch between them costs you the thread you were holding. Ninety minutes is enough for a 900 to 1,200 word post that answers one question properly. It is not enough for a guide that tries to answer ten.

The short version

• Five blocks: 15 minutes research, 10 outline, 35 draft, 20 edit, 10 publish.
• Research ends when the timer ends — three sources, then start writing.
• The outline is a list of questions a reader would ask, not a list of headings.
• The first draft is allowed to be bad. Fixing it is a separate job done later.
• Editing is three passes in a fixed order: structure, sentences, facts.

The five blocks, with the one rule that keeps each one from eating the next:

Minutes 0–15: research with a stop rule

Open a scratch document and write the post’s question the way a reader would type it into a search box. Not “content marketing tips” — “how long should a blog post be before people stop reading”. One question. If you cannot get it down to one, you are about to write two posts badly instead of one post well.

Then collect three things and nothing else:

• What you already know from doing the work. For a migration post, that is the step order and the one step you always forget.
• One authoritative source — the official documentation, the changelog, the pricing page. Copy the exact sentence and the URL into your scratch document so you never have to find it twice.
• One real example: a screenshot you took, a command output, a before-and-after you can describe from memory.

If a fact is missing when the timer rings, do not go looking for it. Type a placeholder — [CHECK VERSION] — and keep moving; you will verify it in the edit block or cut the sentence. Research is where time disappears, because every tab feels useful and usually is not. The post needs three things, and you already have two.

Minutes 15–25: turn the outline into questions

Most outlines are a list of nouns: “Introduction, Why it matters, Best practices, Conclusion.” That produces a post that says nothing, because “Best practices” does not tell you what to write underneath it. Replace each heading with the question a reader would actually ask, then write the one-line answer. If there is no one-line answer, you have found the section that will take an hour — cut it or split it into its own post.

This is the outline I type, every time:

TITLE (the reader's question, in their words)

1. What do I need before I start?
   -> one line:

2. What does it look like when it is done?
   -> one line:

3. What goes wrong, and what do I do about it?
   -> one line:

4. What is the checklist?
   -> one line:

STILL OWED: [ ] screenshot  [ ] version number  [ ] link

Four questions is a 900-word post; six is about 1,200. More than that is a series, and it will read like a list of everything you know instead of an answer to the title.

Minutes 25–60: draft straight through

The draft block has one rule: do not stop to fix anything. Not the sentence you just wrote, not the fact you are unsure of, not the comma you can feel is wrong. Every stop is a context switch, and the switch back costs more than the fix saved.

Practical version of that rule:

• Write the opening as three blunt sentences that answer the question, then leave it alone until the edit block. Do not polish it now, and do not write a warm-up paragraph first.
• Fill in each outline question with paragraphs. When a paragraph is not working, type the sentence you are trying to say in capitals and move to the next one.
• No new research. If you need a fact you did not collect, write a placeholder.
• No formatting, no image hunting, no plugin fiddling. Those belong to the publish block.

A thousand words in 35 minutes is under thirty words a minute — slower than you type. The time goes into deciding what the next sentence says, which is the actual work.

Minutes 60–80: edit in three passes

One long read-through finds typos and nothing else, because you cannot judge structure and commas at the same time. Three short passes, in this order:

Pass one, structure. Read only the subheadings and the first sentence under each one. Does the post answer the question in the title? Is any section saying the same thing as the one above it? Cut it, even if you like it. Move the strongest section to the top.

Pass two, sentences. Read each paragraph once, out loud in your head. Split anything over about thirty words. Delete the phrases that only exist to fill space — “in today’s fast-paced world”, “it is important to note that”, “let’s dive in”.

Pass three, facts. Every number, date, product name and version gets checked against the source you saved, or deleted. This is where credibility is decided, and it is the pass people skip when they are running late. If you cannot verify a claim, say plainly that you have not tested it. A shorter post with true sentences is worth more than a long one with one invented figure.

Minutes 80–90: publish, then stop

The publish block is mechanical, so it gets ten minutes:

• Slug: the question, shortened, words separated by hyphens. Set it before you publish — I cover the permalink settings in the WordPress settings I change on every new site.
• Image: resize it before upload, and write alt text that describes what is in the picture rather than repeating the title. Oversized uploads are one of the reasons WordPress sites end up slow.
• Internal links: two or three, each pointing at a post that answers the reader’s next question. Click every one before publishing.
• Excerpt or meta description: two sentences that answer the question again, in different words from the title.
• Check: open the live URL. Does it load, does the title match, does the image appear, does the page fit a phone screen?

Then stop. The temptation is to keep tweaking, and that is how a 90-minute post becomes an afternoon. Tomorrow’s post is the next thing, not this one.

Where the 90 minutes actually goes wrong

Four failures account for almost all of it. Research expands to fill the time available, so set an alarm. Editing starts during the draft, so the draft never gets finished. The outline is written as nouns instead of questions, so the writing block has nothing to aim at. And the post tries to be comprehensive, when comprehensive is three posts and the reader came for one answer.

One honest exception: a post that depends on data you must gather — dashboard screenshots, a test to run, numbers to collect — is not a 90-minute post. Give it three hours or split it; forcing it into the block means publishing half the evidence.

Start smaller than it sounds: take the question people ask you most, set a timer for 15 minutes, and do only the research block. When it rings, write the four questions and stop if you want. And if you are choosing what to write next, the fastest source of real questions is the Performance report in Google Search Console: the queries your pages already appear for are the questions you are closest to answering well.