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Time Management for Bloggers pt. 1: Time Management Tips

Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned blogger, it’s easy to let the amount of time poured into your blog get out of hand. Over the course of the last 3 years that I have been blogging, I discovered that I had inadvertently found ways to save me time and valuable energy. Work smarter not harder, right? 

Time Management for Bloggers is a 2 part series, this week will be focused on a few tips that you can start incorporating into your blogging routine today.
Time Management Tips for Bloggers
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Set up “systems” for the tasks you do over and over again

For example, there are a few different types of emails that I send out consistently each month. Sponsor communication, responding to co-hosting inquiries, etc. I found myself typing up essentially the same message each time I needed to send an email out. It was a massive time suck. Then… lightbulb! I took the important info from the email and saved it as a text file on my computer. Now whenever I get an email asking about co-hosting the next Collective, all I have to do is copy and paste what I have saved and add a little blurb to make it personal to who I’m sending it to.

Create a daily, weekly, and monthly to-do brain dump masterlist

I am one of those people who stress about the “un-dones”. You know, the things that have to be done eventually but not necessarily right at this moment? Since I started doing a weekly brain dump to get everything off my mind and on to paper where I could check it off, I no longer stress about forgetting something important or dwell on a big project coming up. It’s like, once it’s off my mind I’m free to focus on the tasks at hand for the day. Less stress=more productivity.

 

Use daily blog to-do checklists

There are really great resources out there to help walk you through some of the tasks you should be doing each day to keep your blog humming. Tweeting, instagramming, facebooking, pinning, responding to comments, emails, editing, writing, reading, photo taking, it’s enough to make a person go mental! Using a checklist helps remind you of what you should be doing for the day. Once it’s done, you can pat yourself on the back for the accomplishment and relax.

Set office hours

This is something that I have decided to start incorporating TODAY. It’s so easy to get sucked into the “let me just check my email quick… I just need to respond to this comment… I just need to finish up this post…” routine. I have found myself many nights coming home from a long night of teaching and immediately hopping onto my computer so that I can make a deadline, then finally getting into bed around midnight. From now on, whatever can’t be done between the time I wake up until a. I head off to teach or b. until my husband comes home from work (if it’s a non teaching night) won’t get done. If that means less obligations and maybe less opportunities, so be it. I found myself telling my husband yesterday, “I’m always at work. There’s always something that I COULD be doing work-related.” and I realized how crazy that sounds. It doesn’t have to be that way, but I have to learn how to shut the workaholic in me down for the night.

Have your own time management tip you’d like to share? Leave it in the comments below! And make sure to come back next week for part two where I’ll be sharing my favorite time management tools…

You may already know that this series is inspired by The Intentional Life Project. This month’s theme is TIME MANAGEMENT. The Intentional Life Project will now be a monthly link up the last friday of each month. Want to take part? Come back April 25th to find out what the theme for May will be!

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