Time Management - A HowTo for Bloggers

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P.S: This post is part of a series of posts focusing on Time Management for bloggers. Here’s Part 2 and Part 3 of this on going series. Be the first to know about updates by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed!

Time Management is one of the most important skills one learns in his life. Proper and effective time management is essential to living a balanced and good life. As in life, time management is very important in blogging too. You are bound to struggle in your blogging career if you do not manage your time effectively.

In this post, I aim to explain how to mange your time more effectively and take out time for more, important activities, which you would not have been able to do so normally.

What are the consequences of poor time management?

First, we look at the consequences of managing your time poorly. There are many of these, and you’ll be surprised to see how much of an effect they can have on you:

• You try to do a lot of things at the same time. You don’t focus on one particular job at a time. You are not able to plan and work it out effectively. Halfway through the job, you cant go on, simply because you don’t know what to do next! You ditch it and then take up another job, to achieve the same result.
• Your readers do not trust you anymore. Your posting frequency is irregular. Sometimes you post 3 articles in a day and sometimes you take one week long gaps. Your readers can’t determine your posting frequency and don’t know when to expect a post from you. As a result, they quit reading your blog, rather than wasting their time, looking for updates.
• You become unable to fulfill other important responsibilities. There are other important things in life other than blogging, for example family,education and friendships. You simply don’t have enough time for them. When you’re not doing this, you’re doing that, or you’re wasting your time, day-dreaming. Everybody becomes sick of you. Surprising?
• Your life becomes a MESS. No need to explain that, I think!

Scared Enough?

Well, you should be! Not to worry though, for I have for you some tips on managing your time more effectively. So, read on!

Set up a Weekly and Monthly Scheduler for your self.

This is probably the most clichéd term in the whole concept of Time Management. But it is harder to stick to it than it is to start using one. So you gotta be beware of that.

Weekly schedulers allow you to plan out an entire week before hand, so that you know how much time you have free in the upcoming week and then you can schedule appointments and other things accordingly. This also let’s you create a kinda time-buffer if some emergency occurs as you can accordingly re-schedule your appointments and other jobs.

I have created a sample weekly scheduler that you can use, and have even filled out one so that you can get the idea:

If you like it, you can download it too!

A note : This scheduler is created in Microsoft Excel. Why? Excel is a lot more flexible than Word in this matter and you can easily change the data for all related cells by changing the data in the parent cell(The ‘Key’ in this scheduler). Also, I’ve given different background colors and keys to different types of jobs, so that you can easily distinguish between them.

You should also use a monthly scheduler, which lets you plan out events in a whole month. You can easily create your own, or download the one I created for you: Download timemanage-monthly.xls.

Now what you’ve got to do is simply start filling in the scheduler and become a more efficient blogger!

P.S: This post is part of a series of posts focusing on Time Management for bloggers. Here’s Part 2 and Part 3 of this on going series. Be the first to know about updates by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed!