This post was written by Glen Stansberry of LifeDev (feed). Check out LifeDev for more tips on using tools to make your life more productive.
Creating posts for the future is an extremely valuable and overlooked feature in most blogging platforms. Interestingly, the majority of people don’t even know that this feature exists in most blogging tools. Yet I’d argue that it’s one of the most important features, at least in terms of being productive.
Basic productivity is aided by dividing up your tasks by the tools that are used to complete them. For example, if you’re going to be on the phone, make all of your calls in one sitting. By grouping together your tasks by tools, you can complete the tasks quicker. If you’ve heard anything about GTD (Getting Things Done), this will sound familiar to you.
For our purposes, the tasks are blog posts and the tool is your blogging platform (IE WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, etc.). So if you want to be uber-productive, this means writing multiple posts in one sitting. In fact, you could even crank out some/most of your posts for the week in one sitting, depending on the type of blog you have. (This method doesn’t work well for news breaking blogs.) Just write them up, and set your post to publish in the future. Easy peasy.
Try it out and see how much time you’ll save with blogging in the future. And for that matter, if you’re interested in learning more about GTD, check out my GTD Cheatsheet Series for a head start.
Thanks for reminding me about this feature of wordpress! Pure gold! Tried it out yesterday and it worked like a charm. I have been percolating on an idea for a series post and this is the perfect way to get rolling on it.
Thanks a ton!
I use wordpress and I would have been lost without the ability to future date my posts. I had a trip planned for 4-04 through 4-11, so I did an intense blogging marathon 3 days before leaving and set up my posts. They all went off like clock work and I just checked in each day to verify there weren’t any problems and to reply to comments.
I don’t see myself needing to use this again for a long time, however I love this feature of wordpress.
If you don’t mind ignoring the hard sell, you should use the post schedule ping optimizer (if you have a wordpress plugin):
http://www.runtowin.com/recommends/Ping-Optimizer
It basically will ping things that are future dated and prevent pings when editing old articles. It works pretty well.
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anyone know when blogspot might start allowing this?