Discussion Time: Blogging and Time Management

When it comes to blogging there is one thing everyone finds tough to handle at first; and that’s the time management behind it all. You sign up to WordPress, create your blog and start posting, and all of a sudden you wonder what you’ve gotten into when all your free time is consumed by a blog you thought wouldn’t require more than an hour of your time each day.

Everyone has their own way of managing the time constraints blogging comes with. Everyone has their own way of managing their schedule so they can get everything done alongside their other day to day tasks. Being 100% honest I’m still not sure how I manage my blog, but at the moment it works so I’m not going to question it too much!

Blogging and Time Management

I know that the way I manage my time when it comes to blogging won’t work for everyone. However I’m going to share how I do manage and schedule posts, while still finding time to blog hop, in the hopes that some of it will help others out there reading this.

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Planning Posts

Let’s take book tags as my first example. Everyone knows how it is with tags, you start off with one or two but before you know it you have more than ten still waiting to be drafted and published and you’ve lost track of them. Whenever I’m tagged, before I do anything else, I write it down.

Very soon after I started blogging I created an Excel document to keep track of my posts, and the more time I spent blogging the more I added to it. As well as a list of the posts I have published, and have still to publish, I have a tab for the books I read to help me update Goodreads, a tab for future Top Ten Tuesday posts, and a tab for the tags and awards I’ve been nominated for.

Basically if I lost this spreadsheet I would pretty much lose my whole blog.

When it comes to planning though nothing beats notebooks. I’ve found these aren’t ideal for every aspect of blogging, hence why I have my Excel spreadsheet, but most nights I like to be try and write at least one post, and so I use a notebook to plan what posts I’d like to write each night. There can be just as many red crosses as there are blue ticks. but that’s the reason I write in pencil, it’s easier to erase mistakes that way.

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Drafts

Having a cushion of draft posts ready to be published is something that works incredibly well for me. However this is something I had to dedicate a lot of time to over countless weeknights/weekends in order to create that cushion. At the moment I have over thirty posts in my drafts folder and this has enabled me to taking a step back when needed, something that became very much needed when I started my new job last month

Having these draft posts has allowed me to focus on blog hopping, while still enabling me to update my own blog.

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For me blog hopping and interacting with the bookish community comes first. This is helped by the backlist of drafts I have which enables me to take a night off from writing posts but still have something to publish. I think the key to time management when it comes to blogging is to be flexible, you need to be willing to shift your priorities when it comes to real life, when it comes to blog hopping, and when it comes to posting.

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Now Onto the Discussion Part of This Post:

Have you ever had problems with time management when it comes to blogging, or with real life getting in the way?

Is there anything in this post you use when it comes to your own blog, or that you think you could use going forwards?

What do you use to manage your time; your real life and blogging life?

Let me know in the comments below.