Being a blogger — whether full time and professional, or as a part time hobby — can be a fun, uplifting, and potentially lucrative endeavour, in a range of different ways.
For one thing, being a blogger gives you the opportunity to refine, formulate, and work out your own ideas on different topics so that you become — hopefully — more knowledgeable and insightful.
For another thing, being a blogger can mean that you benefit from having a creative outlet waiting for you at all times. If you ever want to try out a bit of poetic travel writing, for example, your blog can be a great avenue for doing that.
As with so much else in life, though, getting the most out of being a blogger requires good overall time management.
Here are a few tips for effectively managing your time as a blogger.
”Batch” together tasks such as idea generation, writing, and editing
If you’re running an active blog and are the primary contributor, it’s likely that you will need to put out a significant number of posts in a given week.
Writing a blog post can be time consuming, but so can just coming up with the ideas for what to write about, and editing and uploading your posts once they’re done.
What’s more, every time you switch between these tasks — ideas generation, writing, editing, uploading, and so on — you need to “change gears” and are likely to lose your sense of “flow,” at least temporarily.
One good time management technique to use here, that can also boost efficiency, is to “batch” together related tasks all at once.
Dedicate one big block of time — or even one whole day — purely for idea generation. Then another for writing. And another for editing. And so on.
This way, you still in that state of “flow” more often, and don’t need to “shift gears” as often.
Outsource as many technical details as you can
As a blogger, your main focus should be on writing high quality blog posts, consistently — as opposed to spending a lot of your time working on things like back-end site maintenance.
Outsourcing as many technical details as you can, such as with the help of IT outsourcing companies, can help to free up a lot of your time, while simultaneously meaning you’re under less stress.
Maintain consistent daily routines and structure as a whole
If your blog is your business, in particular, you’ll be confronted by some of the key issues that all freelancers and remote entrepreneurs are faced by — which is inconsistent schedules, and work creeping into your personal life.
Maintaining consistent daily routines, and a consistent structure to your days as a whole, can help greatly in keeping you consistent with your work, and in preventing you from procrastinating excessively, among other things.
Have a set time each day when you start working on your blog, a consistent time when you “clock off” for the day, set mealtimes (and ideally pre-prepared meals), and consistent sleep and wake times, for starters.
