Beginner Blogger

This is an update from my post a week ago about batching for bloggers. My goal was to batch certain tasks together to create more time to focus on more important activities like creating blog posts and becoming more of an expert in my field. Also to eliminate distraction from achieving these tasks.

The verdict? Quite a fail. However(!) I have learned a valuable thing or two that I would like to share with you in regards to batching tasks. Firstly though lets recap what my goal was and how I actually did.

• Checking my beginnerblogger email – 3xweek I was checking this way too often. Possibly my biggest disappointment. I remember leaving it open and reading emails as they would come in. In fact, I’m almost ashamed to admit it – I kept on hitting the ‘get mail’ button on several occasions. I was procrastinating badly. This is a big no-no. What I should have done is checked it once, gone through all my emails then close the mail program.
• Checking my personal email – 1xday. I did this once a day and more. I have over 1300 emails unread in my personal email, I should just mark all as read. In fact I am going to do this right now! I just cleared 1366 emails which are now marked as ‘read’ in my personal gmail account. That feels so amazingly good. If you’d like to know how to mark all emails in google as read in less than 5minutes – even if you have thousands like I did – shoot me an email at blogme@beginnerblogger.com
• Reading my RSS feeds – 1xweek. This was a success. I have my feeds go through newsgator and you may or may not be aware that they are now merging with google at the end of August so I’ve made the transition and because of that I am starting my subscriptions from scratch.
• Checking facebook – 1xday. I probably did it more than 1xday but I certainly am not checking it every hour or 10 minutes like I used to. I am batching them mainly for viewing at night on the bus ride home from work and then I am all up to date with facebook. I achieved the goal of making one facebook message per day.
• Checking Twitter – 2xday. Twitter is becoming like my facebook obsession. I failed my goal however I feel like I have achieved a lot by being on twitter a lot. I’ve gotten myself quite a following (over 50!) and am making connections with my potential audience which is what I want. I made many updates to twitter. If you haven’t already – please add me to twitter, I would love to hear from you!
• Writing blogs – 2xweek. I really failed this – I wanted to blog a lot more than I did. I had complete writers block over the weekend. I feel though I am making up for it this week. I will improve this.
• Checking Google Analytics – 2xweek. Fail. Fail. Fail. I was checking this about 5 times a day. I just really like stats! There isn’t really much point me checking it either. I need to focus on writing content!
• Checking Feed Burner – 1xweek. I checked it twice. I still need to figure out how it actually works. The stats tracking isn’t as black and white to me as I first thought. If you haven’t already – which I’m pretty sure no-one has please subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Surfing other peoples blogs – 2xweek. I did this. I feel that I don’t need to do this as often really. I don’t want to suffer from an information overload but at the same time I love checking out other peoples blogs. I will click links sent to me on twitter but it doesn’t mean I’m going to subscribe or continue to visit that site.

Given that I pretty much failed my batching task – I did learn a good thing or two.

Probably the most important thing is that when you get your own free time to work on your blog – work on your blog! Don’t waste time constantly checking emails, facebook, twitter etc. Check them all just once if you have to then close them down, put them away. Avoid distractions. I have just come home from work now and am writing this blog post. I checked my beginnerblogger email, personal email and twitter and now have closed them all down – 100% focusing on writing this. It’s only 7.30pm I remember it taking me till about 10pm last week to have written out a blog and the only thing that was stopping my was the above mentioned distractions!

Another thing I learned is that it’s OK to spend as much time as you want with those ‘distraction’ tasks like twitter/facebook etc when it’s not impacting your free time. In my situation I work 9-5, I commute 1 hour to work and 1 hour home. I see this 2 hours as a time for me to do all those things like check email/facebook/twitter etc. Lunch breaks at work for me are also another time I can check these things – I often check out my traffic stats in google analytics in this time also.

Sure, I could utilise my commute time and even do some blogging on the bus but generally I am tired going to work and coming home that checking email/twitter/facebook etc is the perfect time for me to be doing those things. This is just a stepping stone for batching.

I would love to hear what your batching techniques are. Feel free to leave a comment below, shoot me an email, send me a tweet or leave a comment on my new facebook fan page!

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