I think this is one of the hardest things for us as bloggers to deal with. How do you do it all and still live, work and play as you should?
1. When it comes to prioritizing your life, in what place does blogging fall? I don't spend nearly as much time blogging it as I would like. I have two children aged 8 and 3 and also run my own business which means I work 35-40 hours a week around looking after and spending time with children. I work most evenings until 11pm and most weekends. As I work in online marketing, PR and blogging, quite a bit of my work time is also spent writing and blogging for customers, this is however very different to writing my own personal blog which I have much more creative freedom over. It is also really important to me to keep fit so I exercise 3 times a week. I never watch TV or read books as I don't have time and much prefer to blog.
Blogging kind of comes at the end of quite a long list but that doesn't mean that it isn't important to me. I started my blog as a creative outlet so perhaps the fact that it is so low down the list at the moment is a just a symptom of an overly busy life. Not complaining though as I love my life, for me I am achieveing the ideal of work life balance and if I didn't keep busy, I would get bored. As long as I get some time each week to blog I am happy (well most of the time anyway).
2. We all wish we had more free time to dedicate to blogging and all it entails. What are your tricks for taking advantage of the time you do have to be as productive as possible? Yes I wish there were at least four or five more hours in the day. I have just invested in an iphone 4 which is great for catching up with my favourite blogs whilst waiting outside the school, on the train or waiting to go in to a gym class. I have cut down on the number of posts that I write recently and think this has probably benefitted the blog by allowing me to focus more on quality than quantity. I also try not to check emails/ blog stats etc too often as this can be distracting.
My final and post important trick is to stop as soon as you get a mind block or become unproductive and find something else to do instead.
3. Have you discovered any short-cuts that makes blogging easier or more time efficient? The only thing that I do is scribble notes in a note book so that I never spend time at my laptop trying to get inspiration, when I sit down I am ready to write. I also try and make a quick plan in my head or on paper of the points that I want to cover before I start writing.
4. Do you have an editorial calendar or something similar that helps you plan ahead? Not really I find being too regimented stifles my creativity plus I would feel a real sense of failure when I didn't keep to it. I might come up with an idea that I love the sound of to start with but a week later it sounds really boring and I can't be bothered to write about it. I have a white board and lots of notebooks with scribbled ideas but it is all quite random.
5. If time wasn’t an issue what you would be doing on your blog/for your blog that you aren’t doing now? I would spend lots more time improving my photography skills and making outfits. I would love to have a regular feature to show how you can style charity shop clothes to fit with this seasons trends, I would also love to spend much more time finding out about new eco/ ethical designer doing interviews and making DIY pieces.
I would love to hear what you think about finding the right balance. Do you have any tips?
You can find links to all of the Friend Friday Posts on ModlyChic.
Happy Friday!
With warmest wishes
Ceri X
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