If you are anything like me you occasionally run out of month before you can accomplish everything that you wanted to get done. Since I started writing these guest posts I kept telling myself I have plenty of time to write my posts each month and stay on track. I mean, there are 28-31 days in a month I should be able to write 4 posts of various topics quickly and easily.  Heck, I should even be able to write many ahead of time and schedule them to post on specific days. Yeah, Right!

I think of myself as a pretty organized person. I think that you have to be in order to consistently produce quality content for your blog and still maintain a full time job, family and whatnot. Even though I am very organized I sometimes need a little help. I purchased and read the book Getting Things Done. Man, I was energized by the ideas put forth in that book. Many of them I had already been doing in my own life. So the book was so great that I had to share it with one of my friends. He is the least organized person that I've ever known. That is not a judgment call on his personality or anything, it is just a fact based on consistency. He's a great guy who would do anything for you to help you out. He is just disorganized.

He lost it...

Within a week...

He told me he would replace it....

That was two years ago...

Then one day during a meeting I saw his organizer program projected on a screen. This is what I saw.

That high priority item had been on the organizer for about a year. I also know that he's e-mailed himself reminders to get me a copy of the book. But this e-mail is trapped within a set of e-mails that he's sent himself to remind himself of things to do. At last count the number of reminder e-mails was 75. I just had to laugh because the situation has become incredibly funny to me. For one thing, I should have known that this would happen because of his track record and the other just for the sheer irony of the content of the book what happened to it.

Around the same time I bought a small Webber grill (it cost maybe $10 no big whoop, it was on sale) for a Jimmy Buffett Concert back in 2006. Once the concert was over the grill was still hot so I asked my friend (same guy) if he could bring it home in his roommate's truck. Now, I don't really care about getting it back or not, a $10 grill isn't something that I am going to lose sleep over. How many times do you suppose that I've heard "I'm bringing your grill in on Friday"? It is nearly time for another Buffett Concert (2nd one since the grill was bought) and guess what? The grill is still in his garage, probably on top of my copy of Getting Things Done.

What does this have to do with blogging? Nothing much except for this point. Procrastination can kill your blog. If you don't keep your blog updated people will expect it to be stagnant and will stop visiting it. What do you do when you first get online? If it is not directly related to your blog you might fall into the trap of procrastination or Internet ADHD. It is so easy to get distracted by what is being said online that you may forget to speak your own mind. If you go online and start by checking Facebook, MySpace, Dropping Entrecards, Reading RSS Feeds, reading e-mail, checking out your favorite blogs, participating in forums and on an on it is so easy to be caught in distractions. If you do that each day then you may never get around to working on your own blog because you've run out of time.

I've read many bloggers who have posted their methods illustrating how they budget their time to work on their blogs. Many are very good and many are crap. The crap ones are from those blogger who set up a junk blog with no real content but then proceed to tell you how you should run your own blog. If you want to blog better read better bloggers, consistent bloggers, bloggers with their own ideas and bloggers who don't follow the crowd. Are they blogging daily? Do they maintain multiple blogs and blog daily on each of them? Those are the people who most likely have something to tell you. But read them after you've taken care of your own blog and your own blog readers.

So, what do you do to make sure that you have enough time to blog each day?

Drew writes four blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also does a mean cake plow. He recently completed taking 1170+ consecutive photos in 1170+ days. You can visit him at The BenSpark, The Wired Kayaker, Read To Me, Dad, Google is not God.

Posted by BenSpark at 07:58 AM in Posties | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)