Define Blog has a good post on Managing Your Time as a blogger of multiple blogs:
‘If you run several blogs managing your time is highly important. Ideally we would like to take the hours we are awake, divide it by the number of blogs we have and have that be the total amount of time we spend on each one. But this is an impossibility. Do you have a job, do you have friends and family, do you enjoy eating? There are a lot of factors that keep us from working as much as we would like to on our blogs; so finding an effective way to manage your time and input on it is vital….’
I couldn’t agree more with Ryan. Time management becomes a real issue and something that can make or break an entrepreneurial blogger. It isn’t all plain sailing ad the distraction can be paralyzing. I know that there are days where I can spend hours on end doing things that are good things and even related things to blogging – but that are not blogging themselves.
I set myself a 25 posts per day goal to keep my blogs growing – but unless you have some real discipline goals like this can be easily pushed aside. The distractions can be anything from checking your stats, to IM conversations with other bloggers, to ‘tweaking’ design, to reorganizing categories to… you name it. Whilst all of these things are important to a blog – they can also take you away from your core business – providing content.
I’d be interested to hear how others manage their time? Do you have a daily rhythm that helps you stick to your goals or do you find yourself getting distracted (like me)?
Time Management and Multiple Blogging
Darren Rowse recently asked the question how individuals with multiple blogs manage their time over at Problogger.net (Blogging and the Art Time Management. A few months ago, I wrote a short article on Time Management Tips for Bloggers. However, I didn…
My ‘strategy’ as I seek to build up several blogs is (at present) to definitely post at least one article per day (whilst I’m doing a regular job, getting my head around this, and getting friends and particularly spouse ‘on side’ with this extra obsession with being at my laptop reading or typing).
For blogs which are not totally time or event dependent (ie they are not primarily news or review sites) my plan (though this hasn’t worked too well just yet) is to take extra time when I can to build up a buffer zone of articles which will auto-post. Of course this isn’t possible for sites which need to share timely info.
If I don’t spend at least an hour a day (on average) adding content to my blog, then I am disappointed. I too can become too easily distracted on doing ‘blog-like’ activities that aren’t actually building my blog. These peripheral activities may be useful but they aren’t core and so I don’t include them in my ‘hour’. I generally do my regular hour sometime between 10-11.30pm.
My mind is usually in blog mode, and I try to keep the tools of the trade (I wrote about this at my site) with me all the time – so in reality I am probably spending far longer on my blog activities than the time I am at my computer. Just as the developing photographer begins to look at everything as if through a camera lens, continually composing images even when away from the camera, I am starting to attribute “blog-potential” to the things that happen in and around my life.
My point is that there is a place for time management and discipline in blogging, but it goes far beyond the keyboard – it is an attitude, a mindset, a lifestyle; it is observant, persistent, consistent, passionate, and determined. Sit yourself at a keyboard for x hours per day, but fail to observe, learn, develop, for the other (24-x) hours, and your content will suffer.
I try to remain aware of the 80 / 20 principle (from the book of the same name). This states that 20% of your time / effort yields 80% of your results; and 80% of your time produces 20%. Sorting out which is which is a useful exercise.
[…] ged about it about an hour ago earlier today: Guides to Avoiding Info-Mania by HP UK. Via ProBlogger, original post. time management […]
Well looks like you got to thinking about distractions before my filtering out post. But I agree sometimes having a schedule doesn’t work when you’re dealt distraction after distraction…although I ignore most everything.
For example I am at work right now, but I do not let that get in the way of writing content for tomorrow. Just filter it out.
I am a full-time employee, a mom, write bi-monthly for dotMOMs and monthly for Suite101 and I blog for creative-weblogging, aboutweblogs and my own personal blog. Where do I find the time? When my baby is asleep, I get 1-2 hours to blog/research. On weekends, I get 2-4 hours for more blogging and researching. Time enough. I just make sure that I get the right blog feeds and not get distracted with something else.
At the moment, turning off the TV has freed up enough time to meet my less ambitious posting goal –7 to 10/day over four blogs. On those days where I seem to have an abundance of material, I’ll use WordPress’s ability to post-to-the-future feature to cover days that will be busy with other activities. I’ll also save posts as drafts, needing only to click publish on those days where unforeseen commitments spring up and eat into my blogging time.
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Time management is essential in any endeavor. I would say that it takes proper allocation of time to succeed in any provided task. I have also read people talking about distractions. These are minor instances, which may or may not affect the things that someone does.
I think my productivity made its first real jump when I realized that I needed to follow some kind of system, but the biggest jump came when I discovered that I needed to design one for myself.
The challenge I found was that no-one was helping bloggers (or anyone else for that matter0 to do that. Now, there are many people joining this move to Time Management 2.0 (defining your own system rather than following someone else’s.)
But there are are still very few resources that I have found that offer this kind of help, which lead me to start coming up with some basic ways to help anyone do just that.
I’m not finished… it’s a work in progress, but I am still searching for others who are seeing the coming of 2.0 as something that’s just like Web 2.0.