I started tracking my own writing time around mid-2025, mostly because a friend asked how long my posts take and I genuinely didn’t know. I had a vague “oh, an evening” answer that I’d been giving for years. Turned out the evening answer was extremely wrong. Or rather, the typing part was an evening. The rest had been quietly happening in the background and I wasn’t counting it.
I used a Toggl timer for about twelve weeks. Posts in the 900-1,200 word range, the kind of thing I usually publish here. Twelve posts total over the period, so the sample isn’t huge, but the numbers were more consistent than I expected.
Here’s the rough breakdown per post.
Research and thinking: 1-2 hours
This is the bit I’d been ignoring entirely. The time before I sit down to write, where I’m reading other people’s takes, checking my own old posts, looking up specific numbers, sometimes just walking around thinking about what I actually believe about the topic.
For a post like “three things that moved my organic traffic”, this meant going into Search Console, pulling actual numbers, sanity-checking them, finding the dates of when I’d done each thing, looking at which posts had been affected. About 90 minutes of poking around in spreadsheets and old drafts. None of which is visible in the finished post except as a few specific figures.
For a more opinion-shaped post, the research is lighter but the thinking is heavier. I usually need a walk, a coffee, sometimes a night’s sleep before I know what I actually want to argue. The argument is the post. If I sit down without it, I write a piece that goes nowhere and I trash it.
Honestly the worst version of this is when I sit down too early and burn an hour writing 600 words I’m going to delete. Doing the thinking first, away from the keyboard, saves time even though it doesn’t feel like work.
Drafting: 1-2 hours
The actual typing of the first draft. Once I know what I’m saying, this part goes pretty fast. I write in iA Writer (have been since 2014, I think), in Markdown, with no preview pane open because the preview pane makes me fiddle.
A 1,000-word draft is usually about an hour for me, sometimes 90 minutes if there’s structure to figure out as I go. I tend to write in bursts of 200-300 words and then stop, walk around, come back. The hour is real working time, not chair-time. Chair-time is more like two hours because of the staring out the window and getting more coffee.
I don’t outline formally. I usually have three or four bullet points in a sticky note, the H2s appear as I write, and I rearrange afterward. Some people swear by detailed outlines. I find them constricting. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.
Editing: about 1 hour
This is where the post actually becomes good or stays mediocre. I leave the draft alone for at least a few hours, ideally overnight, and then come back and read it cold. The first pass is structural – does the argument hold up, are the sections in the right order, is there a paragraph I can cut entirely. Usually yes, there is. Cutting is most of editing.
The second pass is line-level. Tightening sentences, killing the hedge words I overuse (I say “actually” and “honestly” too much, I know), making sure the opening doesn’t start with a generic throat-clear, making sure I haven’t repeated myself. I tend to read aloud for the second pass, very quietly, because hearing the rhythm catches things the eye misses.
Editing is the part most new bloggers underbudget. They write the draft and ship it. The result reads like a draft. The hour of editing is what separates “thing I posted” from “thing I’d send a friend”.
Sourcing an image: 15-30 minutes
This used to be five minutes. Then stock-image sites got worse. Now I bounce between Unsplash and Pexels, occasionally Pixabay if I need something specific, and sometimes I give up and make a quick illustration in a markdown-ish tool. Finding an image that isn’t a clichéd “woman laughing at salad” stock shot for a post about CMS choices is harder than people give it credit for.
If you’re writing about a tool you can usually screenshot the tool itself, which is less of a hunt. There are some image-generation tools that help here too, depending on the post. For more abstract topics, expect to spend half an hour scrolling for something that fits the tone.
Publishing and SEO checks: 30 minutes
This is the bit nobody talks about and it adds up. Pasting into the CMS, formatting, adding the right tags and category, writing a meta description, writing an excerpt that isn’t just the first paragraph, checking that internal links work, checking the slug is sensible, looking at the title one more time and probably changing it once.
I check the post with Search Console URL inspection if it’s a quick update, which adds a couple of minutes. I share to a couple of small places (no big social presence, never had one). Then I close the tab.
Half an hour, give or take.
Total: 4-6 hours per 1,000-word post
Add it up: research and thinking (1-2), draft (1-2), edit (1), image (0.25-0.5), publish (0.5). You land somewhere between four and six hours for what reads in four minutes.
I think this is useful to know because there’s a fairly persistent myth in the indie blogging world that you can sit down and crank out a post in an hour. You can write 1,000 words of something in an hour, sure. But getting from blank page to publishable, with an actual argument, real numbers, decent prose, a reasonable image, and the metadata done properly – that’s a half-day of work, and most of it doesn’t look like writing.
The unsexy implication
If you’re trying to plan a content schedule, this is the math: posting once a week is genuinely a part-time job. Posting twice a week, at this quality bar, is most of a full-time job. The bloggers who do daily posts at decent quality are either doing it as their actual job or they’ve radically reduced what “decent” means (or they have an editorial process I don’t have visibility into, which I assume is the case for the bigger ones).
For me, on this site, with a non-blogging day job and a life, two posts a week is the absolute ceiling and it’s exhausting. One post a week, with a buffer, is the right pace for me. Some weeks I miss it and I’ve made my peace with that. The site has been around since 2002 and the cadence has always been irregular. Nobody complains. People come back when there’s something to come back for.
Anyway, that’s the breakdown. If your posts feel like they’re taking too long, this might be reassuring. They probably aren’t. They probably take exactly as long as they take.