What’s the perfect job? What about a job where you’re your boss, set your working hours, work directly from home, and never have to deal with unreasonable deadlines and do something you like to do? Does it look good? Well that’s the job description of the blogger. However, this is not the whole story! There are very, very few bloggers who have nothing to do but work on their blog and even fewer have a blog that provides a decent source of income, so blogging is, for most of them, a second or even a third “job.”
There are two basic types of bloggers, a regular blogger and a serious blogger.
A regular blogger may have a basically balanced life and a blog that is primarily a hobby. The average blogger will start writing a publication, work on it for a while and then stop doing some other things until he feels like writing again. If the final post doesn’t get many comments, that’s fine;
A serious blogger’s situation is quite different from that of a regular blogger. A serious blogger has a blog that he considers a job – a job that may compete with other important elements of life such as basic function, family, social life and adequate comfort. A serious blogger (almost to an obsessive extent) is committed to maintaining his blog and feels an essential element of everyday life. A serious blogger is frustrated if any blog post sits for 24 hours or so without creating a comment or if the blog’s “strike counter” doesn’t register a certain number of visitors every day. This kind of blogging commitment can take a large part of the day and can easily create some serious struggles between blogging and the rest of life – to avoid it, a serious blogger needs to be organized and effective.
Manage time for a serious blogger! Anyone who feels that the day is too short needs to understand and implement the basic principle of time management: prioritization. Obviously, some things are more important than other things, but some important things may be undone unless you control your schedule and don’t control random events. You need to set priorities and live by them.
Make a list of priorities! To start setting priorities, set up a list of everything you need to accomplish – everything including things you’ve committed to doing, things you want to do, things you know you have to do and things you don’t really want to do but in your mind. Be honest putting everything on the list – take a few hours or more to put it together if you need a lot of time, it’s going to be a good time because you’re about to organize.
Important: You’ll use and modify this list every day, so create the list using some programs that will allow you to move menu items, add items, remove items, and save the list. Only your notepad or word processing program will do well but there are other more specialized programs available – they may even be free, check out: Tucows in tucows. Heap.
Classification! Now carefully consider each item in the list and put each one in one of the following five categories.
You have to get it done today.
You have to get it done this week.
It’s good to do it, and it could be useful.
It’s nice to do, but it’s not really necessary.
unnecessary
Now you have a decent list of priorities. Start every day with this list and every time you realize a new task, add it in a convenient place to the right category. Because “must-do” items are accomplished and moved from the list, some items that need to be done may be moved up, but only if their priorities can be genuinely changed.
Lots of things to do! If the list of items in the two “must accomplish it . . . “The categories are overwhelming, reconsider the importance of each item and re-prioritize if you can, if not select items that you don’t have to do yourself, things like repair projects, business phone calls, business messages, editing functions, language auditing, etc. – some of these things may also be able to be done by someone else. Find a friend, family member, co-worker or independent to do so on your behalf.