Beginner Blogger

Since starting this blog there are many activities I now do that I never did before and some that I have done in the past but are related to my blogging experience. It is quite a long list of activities and thus can take quite a chunk of time out my day.

The following list is the activities I participate in that I think are related to blogging and how much time I spend on each currently.

Activities related to blogging and how much time I spend currently on each

• Checking my beginnerblogger email – 1xday. I check it currently as soon as I get home from work. On and off during the weekends.
• Checking my personal email – 3xday. I check this in the morning when I am walking/waiting/on the bus to work. I don’t make emails then I just read them. I will usually check once again in my lunch time and sometimes more often than that. I will then check again when I get home and the bulk of my emailing will happen then.
• Reading my RSS feeds – 1-2xday. I actually just did a big clean out of all my subscriptions and will start getting new ones in as I enjoy reading my RSS feeds. I generally will check if I have any new ones and read them on the bus to and from work.
• Checking facebook – 1-toomany xday. I check facebook too often. It’s too convenient on my phone. Ok this isn’t 100% related to blogging, but I would love to know a blogger out there that doesn’t have a facebook. I’m currently int he middle of setting up a facebook for beginnerblogger but am having trouble setting a URL for it. But that’s another story.
• Checking Twitter – 1-toomany xday. Ever since I downloaded TweetDeck for iPhone I am checking this many times during the day. At the moment I am just adding people
• Writing blogs – 1-2xweek. This just isn’t enough. I am spending more time doing other things than doing what’s important and that is write content for this blog. This will change.
• Checking Google Analytics – 1-4xday. I just really enjoy looking at my stats! Even though I’m only averaging about 2 visitors a day it’s just exciting to know that people are visiting my site.
• Checking Feed Burner – 5xweek. I don’t check this often, but I check it way more than I should. I think my problem is that I’m not even sure if the feed burner is working properly.
• Surfing other peoples blogs – 3xweek. I should really be checking out more blogs and getting involved with them. I am not doing this at the moment. The main problem is that I haven’t subscribed to anyones RSS – this will be addressed.

The Problem

The problem I have and what I suspect other bloggers have is that they are doing too many activities/time wasting activities that could be batched together to create more time for the things that are really important – that is blogging!

The Solution

The solution I have – and many thanks to the 4-Hour Work Week book which I have just read – is to batch tasks. I mean really batch them. If you are checking facebook over 10xday, checking email constantly during a day you are spending too much time on these activities when you could be doing more important tasks. If you batch tasks to once a day, that ‘task’ is out of the way and you are then free to do more important tasks like blogging!

My Solution – the week batching trial

My solution is to batch tasks. This is my personal solution and trial I am going to run for one week and I will keep reports on how often I check each. It won’t be easy. The trial will start for me tomorrow being Wednesday 28th July 2009 and I will report back with my results on Tuesday

• Checking my beginnerblogger email – 3xweek. Tomorrow is Wednesday. So I will check my beginnerblogger email on Thursday, Saturday and Monday.
• Checking my personal email – 1xday. I will only check my personal email once a day when coming home.
• Reading my RSS feeds – 1xweek. Because I don’t have many RSS subscriptions I will just check this on Friday. I hope to subscribe to more great RSS feeds so if you have a great blog let me know about it!
• Checking facebook – 1xday. I really want to tackle this. I love hearing what my friends are up to, but I can easily batch this in one day. I also want to post an update of myself once a day. I will do my facebooking update on the bus on the way home.
• Checking Twitter – 2xday. I will check this in the morning on the bus to work and on the way home from work. I will post one update a day at least on twitter.
• Writing blogs – 2xweek. This doesn’t mean I’m just going to post 2 blog posts a week. This means I dedicate 2 solid ’sessions’ of writing blog posts. I will do this Thursday and on the weekend.
• Checking Google Analytics – 2xweek. I really don’t need to check my google analytics stats so often. I don’t get enough traffic as it is. The focus is to create more content and make this blog great! I shouldn’t really check it at all – but I still am curious! So I will check this on Thursday and Tuesday.
• Checking Feed Burner – 1xweek. I will check this over the weekend. I really need to figure it out and make sure this is tracking correctly.
• Surfing other peoples blogs – 2xweek. I want to find some great blogs out there that inspire me. Bookmark them, subscribe to them and learn from them. I will do some surfing on Thursday and on the weekend.

So there you have it. This is my batching plan weekly trial. I hope by doing this I won’t be so disctracted and can really focus on particular activities, rather than many at once!

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