The 80,000-Word First Draft Method
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
The process Wiseman has used for all twelve of his books, designed to defeat the blank canvas. The premise is that editing is easy and drafting is hard, so the entire first phase is optimised for volume, not quality. He arrives with a chapter-by-chapter outline and a known point for roughly every thousand words, then gives himself two months to produce 80,000 words. That chunks down to about 1,500 words a day, written first thing in the morning before email or anything else. The only failure condition is missing the word count — quality is explicitly not a goal in phase one. Where evidence or studies are missing, he writes as if he has them and leaves a mental marker to fix later. Once the draft exists, he switches to day-on, day-off editing for about two months.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Build the outline before writing a word
Get a chapter-by-chapter outline and, within that, a structure for roughly every thousand words so you know the point you want to make in each block. If you do not know what you want to say, you have no chance of saying it.
Pro tip If you cannot name the point of the next thousand words, stop and work that out instead of writing.
Watch out Ali stalled at 6,000 words for a year precisely because he started without an outline.
- 2
Set the deadline and do the arithmetic
Commit to 80,000 words in two months and chunk it down to a daily number — around 1,500 words a day. The deadline converts an open-ended creative project into a countable one.
- 3
Write in a protected morning window
Get up, have breakfast, and write until the day's 1,500 words are done. Wiseman writes between roughly 9:00 and 11:30 and lets nothing get in the way. Email and everything else start only after the count is hit.
Pro tip Everything else goes on the back burner until the words exist — the sequencing is the discipline.
- 4
Make word count the only success metric
Quality does not matter in this phase. Wiseman fails only if he does not produce 80,000 words in two months. Removing the quality bar is what keeps the draft moving.
- 5
Fake the gaps and mark them
When you sit down and realise you do not have the evidence or the studies, write anyway and pretend you do, leaving a mental marker to return to. Stopping to research mid-draft breaks the daily count.
Watch out Keep a visible list of the marked gaps or you will lose them in the edit.
- 6
Switch to day-on, day-off editing
Once the 80,000 exist, editing is easy because you have something to work with — you know which bits did not work and can shift material around quickly. Wiseman edits one day on, one day off, doing other things on the off days, for about two months, after which the book is pretty much done.
In the wild
Wiseman has written twelve books since around 2000 and says the process has been identical every time: idea, chapter-by-chapter outline, content mapped in, then two months to get 80,000 words down with quality explicitly deprioritised. After the draft, day-on day-off editing for roughly two months finishes it. He describes himself as very economical in how he does these things — the alternative, working so hard on a perfect first thousand words, is wasted effort because conclusions change later and it all needs rewriting anyway.
→ Twelve published books produced on a repeatable four-month cycle.
Ali had a book deal for about a year and started by assuming he could type 2,000 words a day and finish 80,000 in two months. He got 6,000 words in and stopped, because he had no outline. The following twelve months went into structure, packaging and the central metaphor — real work that produced no words on the page. Wiseman's response was that the structure work still has to convert into words, and that the writer's block was partly a self-imposed high bar: newsletters and videos felt low-stakes and flowed, while the book felt like a magnum opus.
→ Diagnosis: no outline plus an inflated quality bar, the two things the method removes.
Common mistakes
Perfecting the first thousand words
You work hard on the perfect opening thousand words, then change your conclusions later and have to rewrite the whole thing. Wiseman calls this a waste of time — the first draft's job is to put paint on the canvas so there is something to edit.
Starting without a chapter-by-chapter outline
Without the outline you cannot chunk the target into daily counts and you cannot name the point of each thousand words, so the daily session becomes open-ended and stalls. This is exactly where Ali got stuck for a year.
Letting email come before the word count
The rule is that nothing else gets done until the day's words are written. Once the day's other work starts first, the writing window is gone and the two-month arithmetic no longer holds.
From the transcript
“I've got my idea. I've got my outline, a chapter by chapter outline.”
“It does not matter about the quality. That is my first goal. I fail only if I don't produce 80,000 words in 2 months.”
“after you've written the first draft, that first 80,000, boy is it easy.”
From the episode
The Sure-Fire Way To Be Luckier In Life - Advice From Psychology Professor Richard Wiseman