The short version: ChatGPT makes you faster at writing when you already know what you want to say, and it makes you slower when you’re using it to find out. Give it a tight brief, your own points, and your own examples, and a 1,200 word post drops from three hours to 40 minutes. Ask it to think for you and you’ll spend longer editing than you would have spent just writing.
The bottleneck was never typing
For years I assumed writing was slow because typing was slow. It isn’t. I type about 70 words a minute, which is roughly the same speed as everyone else who’s been on a keyboard since 1998. The slow part was never getting words onto the page. It was staring at a blank document trying to work out what the first sentence should be.
That’s the bit ChatGPT fixes. Not the typing. The staring.
Last April I had a client brief land at 11am for a 1,500 word guide on why their sales emails weren’t landing, due by 5pm the same day. Before I built a proper ChatGPT process, that brief would have eaten my whole afternoon and half of my evening. With the process I’m about to walk you through, I had a publishable first draft by 12.40pm. Not because ChatGPT is a better writer than me. Because it took the “what order do these points go in” problem off my plate so I could spend my time on the sentences that needed a human ear.
What I do, step by step
This is the exact sequence I use for client blog posts, my own newsletter (it goes out to just under 40,000 people), and the guides I write for lilachbullock.com. It takes longer to explain than to do.
- Step 1, five minutes: I dictate or type a messy brain dump into ChatGPT. Not a prompt, just the raw thinking. What’s the point of this piece, who’s it for, what do I already believe about the topic, what’s one story or number I want in there.
- Step 2, two minutes: I ask ChatGPT to turn that brain dump into a bullet-point outline with headings, nothing else. Not prose yet. Just structure.
- Step 3, one minute: I edit the outline myself, in the chat, by hand. This is the step almost everyone skips and it’s the one that saves the most time later. If the skeleton is wrong, the draft will be wrong, and fixing a wrong draft takes far longer than fixing a wrong outline.
- Step 4, ten minutes: I ask for a first draft section by section, not the whole thing at once, feeding it my own facts and phrases as I go rather than letting it invent its own.
- Step 5, ten to twenty minutes: I read the whole draft out loud, cut anything that sounds like a LinkedIn infographic, and add back the specific detail that only I would know.
That’s the whole system. No plugins, no fancy custom instructions, no fifteen-step mega-prompt copied from a Twitter thread.
The outline is the whole game
If you take one thing from this post, take this: the speed doesn’t come from ChatGPT writing your sentences. It comes from ChatGPT holding the structure so your brain doesn’t have to. Writers have always been slow at the “what goes where” decision, not the “what words do I use” decision. Give ChatGPT the organising job and keep the thinking job for yourself, and everything moves faster.
I learned this the hard way testing the opposite approach, which I wrote about after running AI on my sales emails for 90 days. When I let the AI make the structural decisions as well as the sentence-level ones, the output was fine but forgettable, and I still had to rewrite most of it because it sounded like nobody in particular. You can read the full breakdown of what that did to my open rates in I Let AI Write My Sales Emails for 90 Days. Short version, the speed was real but the results weren’t, until I put the outline decisions back in my own hands.
Prompts that get me a usable draft
Forget the 40-prompt cheat sheets. I use maybe four prompts, on repeat, for almost everything.
- For the outline: “Here’s my brain dump on [topic] for [audience]. Turn this into a bullet outline with H2s and H3s. Don’t write full sentences yet, just structure and one line under each point about what it covers.”
- For the draft: “Write the section under this heading using my brain dump above. Keep it to 150-200 words, plain English, no corporate phrases, first person, one specific example if you can pull one from what I gave you.”
- For tightening: “Cut this paragraph by a third without losing the point. Keep the number and the example, cut the throat-clearing.”
- For the opening line: “Give me five different first sentences for this piece, each under 15 words, none of them a question.”
Notice none of these say “write like me” or “sound friendly and professional.” Those instructions are almost useless because ChatGPT has no idea what “like me” means unless you show it. I’ve written a whole separate post on why “write like me” prompts fail for small business content and what to feed it instead, which is basically what I’m describing here: your own brain dump, your own examples, your own numbers.
Where ChatGPT slows you down
Here’s the bit most people writing about ChatGPT speed hacks skip over, because it doesn’t fit the “AI writes it in seconds” pitch. If you don’t know what you want to say, asking ChatGPT to write the whole thing from a one-line prompt will cost you more time than it saves. You’ll get a draft back fast, but it will be generic, it will need heavy rewriting to sound like a real person with a real opinion, and you’ll spend 90 minutes fighting with something that reads like it was written for nobody. I’ve timed this. A rushed one-line prompt with no brief takes me longer to fix than writing from a proper brain dump in the first place, roughly double the time, because editing bland prose into something specific is harder than writing specific prose from a blank page.
Speed with ChatGPT is a function of how much of your own thinking you put in at the start, not how clever your prompt is. People who complain that “AI writing sounds fake” are almost always people who skipped the brain dump step and went straight to “write me a blog post about X.”
The edit pass that takes ten minutes, not two hours
Once I’ve got a draft built from my own outline and my own examples, editing is quick because I’m not rewriting, I’m trimming. My checklist:
- Read it out loud once. Anything that makes you wince, cut it.
- Find every sentence that could apply to any business in any industry and either delete it or make it specific.
- Check every claim has a real number, name, or example attached. If it doesn’t, either add one or cut the sentence.
- Cut the last paragraph. Nine times out of ten it’s a summary you don’t need because you’ve already made the point.
That’s ten minutes on a 1,200 word piece, not two hours, because the heavy lifting happened at the brief stage, not the edit stage.
Why this matters beyond blog posts
Writing faster isn’t just about clearing your to-do list. It changes what you can afford to write. When a post takes three hours, you write the five big pillar pages a year and nothing else. When it takes 40 minutes, you can write the smaller, specific pieces too, the ones answering one exact question a client asked you last Tuesday. Those smaller, specific pieces are increasingly what gets picked up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question about your industry, because specific answers to specific questions are exactly what those tools are built to surface. I’ve written more on how that works in how to get your small business quoted by ChatGPT, not just ranked by Google, and it’s worth reading alongside this if speed is the reason you’ve been avoiding writing those smaller pieces at all.
There’s a flip side worth knowing about too. If AI tools are already summarising what your business does when someone asks about you, and they’re getting it wrong or out of date because you haven’t published anything specific in eighteen months, speed of writing becomes a business problem, not just a productivity one. I go into this in why ChatGPT might be telling people the wrong thing about your business, which is a slightly uncomfortable read if you haven’t published much lately.
When to get help instead of doing it all yourself
I’ll be blunt. If you’ve read all of the above and you’re still staring at a blank page three hours later, the problem probably isn’t the prompts. It’s that nobody has ever sat with you and built the actual process, the brief templates, the tone rules, the examples library, for your business specifically. That’s a half-day fix with the right person, not a six-month course. If that’s where you are, it’s worth looking at what an AI consultant for small business does day to day, because most of the value isn’t the AI part, it’s someone building you a repeatable system once so you’re not reinventing it every single week.
The library that makes all of this faster still
One more thing that cut my writing time down again, on top of everything above. I stopped trying to describe my voice to ChatGPT in a paragraph of instructions and started feeding it actual examples of things I’d already written, old newsletters, old LinkedIn posts, old client emails. Ten or fifteen real examples do more work than any tone-of-voice prompt ever will, because the AI is matching real patterns instead of guessing at adjectives like “friendly” or “authoritative.” I built mine out and wrote up the whole method in how to build an AI voice library from your own old content, and it’s the single change that made the drafts need less editing, which is really where the time gets saved.
If you write regularly for other sites too, the same brief-first habit pays off there. When I take on contributors through the guest post guidelines on this site, the ones who send a tight outline and their own examples up front are always the ones whose drafts need one round of edits instead of four, whether they used ChatGPT or not.
Frequently asked questions
Does using ChatGPT to write faster hurt SEO?
Not because of who wrote it. Search engines and AI answer tools don’t penalise you for using ChatGPT, they penalise generic content that says nothing specific. A fast draft built from your own brain dump and your own examples ranks the same as one you typed by hand. A fast draft built from a one-line prompt with no real detail struggles regardless of who or what wrote it.
How much faster does ChatGPT make writing?
For me, a 1,200 word blog post went from roughly three hours to about 40 to 60 minutes once I had a proper outline-first process. The saving comes almost entirely from skipping the blank-page stage, not from the sentences ChatGPT writes.
Can I use ChatGPT to write a whole blog post in one prompt?
You can, but it will read generically and you’ll spend longer editing it into something specific than you would have spent writing from your own outline. One prompt for a whole post is the slowest method dressed up as the fastest one.
What’s the single biggest time-waster people make with ChatGPT?
Skipping the brain dump and going straight to “write me a post about X.” Without your own points and examples first, ChatGPT has to guess, and editing a guess into something true and specific takes far longer than writing from a clear brief in the first place.
Related reading: Why AI Pricing Advice Is Quietly Training Small Business Owners to Undercharge and Why Your Analytics Are Hiding How Many Customers AI Is Sending You.
