5 Time Management Tips For Bloggers

By Michael Poh. in Blogging. Updated on November 9, 2023.

Maintaining consistency for your blog can be quite a challenge. There are many areas to cover: ensuring regular updates to your posts, maintaining content quality, keeping up with trends, moderating feedback, and more.

As a result of the need to meet readers’ expectations, bloggers must effectively utilize their available time. What they need is sound time management. That’s why I’ve listed a few tips here that you might find useful. These are merely suggestions; some of you may prefer a less rigid approach to time management when writing something creative and original.

You might prioritize the art over delivery. Personally, I prefer a balance between spontaneity and structure to ensure I meet my deadlines for submitting entries.

1. Catch Ideas As They Pop Up Unexpectedly

Just as writers and influential people often keep journals to record their experiences, feelings, and thoughts, bloggers can adopt this practice to generate ideas for their blog content. In addition to providing original ideas for your writing, capturing these thoughts as they arise can save you a significant amount of time during the brainstorming process.

By the time you sit down to write your piece, you will have a collection of ideas to work with. Our minds function best through associations, so it becomes easier to transition from one idea to another when you have several good leads to start from.

This approach also serves as an effective strategy to overcome writer’s block. Instead of beginning with a blank slate, you can build upon the ideas you have already noted down.

2. Plan an Outline Prior to Writing

After gathering all the ideas in your head and on your notepad, begin by creating an outline of your post’s content. Starting with a simple outline allows for easy changes and the addition of new ideas. This enables you to cohesively link various random ideas together, forming a coherent and convincing piece.

Having a basic structure for your piece’s flow provides a clearer direction for your thought processes, which is essential for keeping your writing on track. This makes it easier to produce the final piece, overcome writer’s block, and prevent or minimize the possibility of duplicate work (in which case, you won’t have to start the same project from scratch).

3. Sticking to a Routine

Humans are creatures of habit.

Once you have established a set of routines and follow through with them day by day, you will find that it is not easy to break the streak. This is beneficial for you as a blogger because it means you have a system in place, and that system will help you meet deadlines.

The best thing about systems is that you can choose the optimal time of day to write and then build your routine around it. It takes a bit of experimentation to find the right time for the right task.

Perhaps you are the nocturnal type who prefers to write during the wee hours of the night. It doesn’t matter; what matters is that you establish a schedule for your tasks, making it more difficult to procrastinate. Habits may take some time to form, but once they are formed, it is equally challenging to break them.

4. Deal With One Thing at a Time

While working on your masterpiece, it is often all too easy to become distracted by other activities running in the background. You might have social messengers and video-streaming sites to check out, or personal emails to attend to. You may console yourself by thinking that you are multitasking and getting everything done simultaneously, but in reality, you are just distracted.

Try to focus on just one thing at a time. This is an effective time management mindset because it instills discipline in what you do. It also ensures that your mind does not wander from one task to another and that you will not lose your train of thought.

Every time you do get lost, your mind needs to trace back to where you stopped to resume the thought process. This wastes an inordinate amount of time when every distraction adds up.

5. Have a Priority List

Creating lists is one of the most fundamental ways to manage time. If maintaining such lists is a lifesaver for you, then a priority list is your guardian angel. In a priority list, you can rank the importance of each task, allowing you to focus on the most urgent ones.

The list is created based on the importance you assign to each task. Does it need to be completed sooner or require more time? Place it higher on the list. Can you skip or forgo a certain task? Then, place it lower on the list.

The idea is to concentrate more on tasks that need to be completed earlier. For this to work, we cannot choose to do things based on how easy they are to complete or our personal preferences. Prioritization benefits your time management by first highlighting what requires your attention most urgently.