How can we make time for blogging?

We all have times where it seems that there just isn’t any time to blog, even when there are a ton of ideas swirling around in your head. If you have regular life commitments that don’t allow you time to blog at your leisure, you have to make the most of the time you do have to blog. There are definitely plenty of ways to do this, but first and foremost, you need to make the commitment to do so. Here is how you can find the time to blog when it seems you just can never find the time to do it.

Making the time
Make a point of finding 15 minutes in the day to blog… and once you start looking, it might be quite easy to find. Is it making your coffee at home instead of taking the time to stop at Starbucks? Carpooling with other parents? Setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier than you need to get up? And when you make that time, use it to blog and try not to let other family duties interfere with your 15 minutes. This means no cooking, no laundry, no walking the dog.

Planning calendar
Mark off the days you should blog, then do your best to stick to it. It is surprisingly easy to keep putting blogging off, then suddenly discover it has been 7 weeks since your last blog post. So make a blogging schedule and keep to it as best you can.

Notes
When you come up with a blog post idea, write it down. Many bloggers who are pressed for time find that they sit down to blog and can’t think of a single thing to write about. If you keep a list of blog post ideas, even if it is just a title or a couple off-hand notes, this can work wonders for helping you get started when you know you only have ten minutes to blog before the kids need to get up for school.

Automate
Install a plugin to automatically post related articles rather than hunting them down yourself. Use an RSS feed reader to quickly scan industry news, I highly recommend Google Alert. Think of what you can do that relates to your blogging that you can automate… this way you can spend more time doing the actual blogging rather than the behind the scenes stuff that needs doing.

Hand write
You can spend your hour handwriting and editing blog posts, then when you have time, quickly type them into the computer. Because you aren’t having to pause to think up how you want to say something, you can enter your blog post pretty quickly, do a spellcheck and hit publish.

Set Goals
Do you know where your blog is going? Or where you want it to be in X number of months? If you blog without any kind of goal in time, you could be focusing on the wrong things. It could be something as simple as writing a blog post on something specific, or trying to publish 3 new blog posts a week for a month? Or even something longer term, such as getting to the point where you can quit your day job so that blogging can become your day job. Whatever your goals are, they can actually help you stay motivated and on track for what you want your blog to do in the long run. And when you have goals set, it can help you organize yourself and your time better to achieve what you want out of it.

You wouldn’t be the first blogger who tries to squeeze minutes out of a day to blog, when there are so many other things going on that demand attention. But if you follow these tips, it can help you find those precious minutes you can use to blog, and to achieve the goals you want to when it comes to your blog. There are many very successful bloggers who started out the very same way, when time was scarce but desire was strong.