I issued myself a seemingly-impossible challenge eight months ago: to create content within five minutes. Why? Because I was scared.
What scared me?
I was scared by generative AI’s ability to quickly produce content. So I wrote this on LinkedIn:
I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of one aspect of #generativeai:
Its ability to write something in about a minute.
(OK, maybe five minutes if you try a few prompts.)…What happens to us writers when a five-minute turnaround becomes the norm?
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbredehoft_generativeai-activity-7065836499702861824-X8PO/.
Never mind that the resulting generative AI content was wordy, crappy, and possibly incorrect. For some people the fact that the content was THERE was good enough. After all, can’t you hire a cheap copywriter to edit the generative AI dreck?
Now I’ve argued that there are benefits to a slower (i.e. greater than five minutes) content production process that results in more mature content.
But what if you need the content within five minutes? People aren’t going to wait for my dilly-dallying.
In fact, my LinkedIn post eight months ago was prompted by an encounter with an impatient content customer. I was waiting for some information before I wrote the content, and someone got tired of my waiting and just asked a generative AI engine to write something. (I think I was supposed to thank them for helping me, but I didn’t.)
This is not an isolated incident, and even with our lamentations that generative AI content blows monkey chunks, it’s still going to be “good enough” for some people.
So if I’m going to continue to make my living as a temperamental writer who is a “you can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” type, I need to create my content VERY quickly.
And sometimes I’m going to have to take extreme measures to get that content out in five minutes.
Measure one: don’t sleep on the content
In the past, and in the present when I can, I like to let a draft rest as I “sleep on it.” And I give my customer an answer in the morning.
I then return to the content with a fresh pair of eyes and modify it (usually by removing huge chunks of text).
But sometimes you have to take extreme measures, including skipping the sleep on it step.
Of course to do this, you need to approach the “draft 0.5” correctly with a focused message.
How do you jump straight to a polished piece? Meat Loaf and the Beastie Boys aren’t going to tell me. I need to go to the ancient Greeks.
Measure two: let full-grown ideas spring out of your head
Non-believers think that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have some really weird practices. But frankly, they’re mild compared to ancient Greek mythology, which primarily consists of Zeus trying to be the Wilt Chamberlain of his time.
Take the story of Zeus lusting after Metis and succeeding in his pursuit, until an oracle (unrelated to Larry Ellison) prophesied that Zeus and Metis’ second offspring would overthrow Zeus. To prevent this, Zeus swallowed Metis.
Makes sense to me.
Then the story gets REALLY weird.
After a time, Zeus developed an unbearable headache, which made him scream out of pain so loudly it could be heard throughout the earth. The other gods came to see what the problem was. Hermes realized what needed to be done and directed Hephaestus to take a wedge and split open Zeus’s skull.
From https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/The_Myths/Birth_of_Athena/birth_of_athena.html.
You won’t believe what happened next!
Yup, Athena, as a full-grown adult (wearing armor, no less), popped out of Zeus’ head.
Which was awfully convenient, since they didn’t have to go through potty training and learning the Greek language and all of that, because Athena was already mature.
So if I can conceive of my content as a full-grown piece of work from the outset, it will make it easier (and hopefully faster) to create it.
Results
I wasn’t able to write this particular blog post in five minutes, and I still had to go through some back-and-forth to tweak things such as headings. But I executed this content more quickly than normal.
More work to do to meet the five-minute goal.
Bredemarket 
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