Time Management tips when writing multiple blogs

I’ve written about time management before but with a continued increase in my blogging activity of late I’ve had to do some serious reassessment of how and when I blog and manage the various blogging related tasks I have lately. From this I’ve made some changes to the way I operated that I’d like to share.

1. Email is the enemy
I suppose I’ve always known this but recently I had become so consumed with dealing with email (and not dealing with it when there was just too much) that my blogging had started to suffer. I haven’t given up on email completely but I’ve changed the way I prioritise it.

Now I don’t read all my email in the morning. I’ll have a quick look through the list and find anything that needs to be posted or appears to be urgent, and I’ll deal with these, but other emails are left for later in the day, only once I’ve got through blogging to my various sites

2. Better feed management
I shake my head when I read bloggers boasting how they have 400-500 subscriptions in their feed reader accounts. I peaked at 120 and recently I’ve actually been cutting them back, and including links to a number of my own sites I’m down to 88 feeds at the time of writing, and will probably change a few more over the next couple of days. This reduction at a time that I’ve actually increased my level of blogging 2 fold and over more sites. You’ve really got to start asking questions about the feeds you read if you want to maximse your blogging time. I still subscribe to blogs from individuals, and a number of “fun” personal interest feeds as well (Slashdot and Wired come to mind), but I’ve focused a lot of my feeds on major sites and/ or companies or people who posts a lot of information and/ or point to other sites. For example, I have subscriptions to RSS feeds from Topix, Yahoo! News, MSN and Google on a number of topics, and blogs such as Problogger and ThreadWatch also give me a reasonable run down of anything I’ve missed over night. I would hope that the Blog Herald also provides a similar service to readers as well.

3. Better feed grouping
I realised that my feeds were all over the place so I’ve rearranged them into folders that directly relate to the blog I’m writing about, or the subject matter (for example I have a stats folder that shows incoming links info for my blogs). Not jumping around to individual feeds means that I click on the topic area for the specific blog and all the news is presented in front of me, in one list for me to read.

4. Speed reading Bloglines
Following on from point 3, I also no longer post to a blog once I find something interesting to write about in my feeds: I open the story of interest in a new tab (in Firefox by clicking the scroll wheel on my mouse) and I only come back to read it, and perhaps post about it (I would probably only post 1 in 2 or 3 I open) after going through all the items for that blog. It means I’m not swapping and changing between Bloglines, the administration interface of the blog and the item of interest regularly. Its saves time and actually works.

5. Power posting
Once I’ve got through my feeds for the particular blog, I “power post” what I’m interested in for that particular blog, and I don’t get distracted or change to anything else until I’m finished. If I’m concerned that I’m posting too much content in a short period of time (depending on the blog) I’ll pre-post them: ie, in WordPress if you change the time stamp to a time forward of the current point and publish the post it will only physically be posted to the site at the time specified. There are arguments for and against this practice, but if you’re looking to have content regularly posted to your blog but don’t want to be writing it all day this is a handy feature to use.

See Also

What to Do When Faced with the Thought: “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Life”

6. Repeat 4 and 5 for each blog.

7. Once finished return to email and deal with any remaining emails.

Does this work? we’ll I’ve improved my efficency greatly since doing things this way, and what’s more I’m enjoying blogging more again as well.