How to Be a More Efficient Blogger: Planning {Craft Your Blog}

blogging calendar

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The other day husband took the Bit for a day to see her grammie and left me alone for about seven hours, many of which I spent writing. I reported on Facebook that I wrote a book review, three long blog posts and four short ones, as well as doing some other creative stuff with that time. I was going to try to add up how many words that was, but I actually now can’t remember what all I wrote that day. It was easily 1,500 words or more, I’d guess.

Several people marveled at how I was able to get so much done and wondered what my secrets are. On this particular day I was a lot more efficient than normal because I knew it was my one day of the week to work (and the first day since the Bit’s break started that I had more than a couple of hours to work at a time), but I do tend to produce a lot of words regularly by necessity.

I write three blogs that I try to update daily during the week — one of which often includes new article content that is being promoted on the blog — as well as reviews and articles for other sites on a semi-regular basis.

How do I do it? There are a lot of things involved in me being able to produce that much decent (and least I hope it’s decent!) content quickly, but the main thing I want to share to start off is the importance of planning.

Plan to Get More Done

It’s so important to have a plan, whether you’re writing/blogging in a marathon session or just want to get your writing done as fast as you can. That’s because if you have an idea of what you’re going to be writing about your mind will already be working on it, so you’ll have some idea how to start when you sit down.

blogging calendar
You can see my planning didn’t go all that well this week. Also, I don’t know what day it is.

Ideally, I do my planning for the week on Sunday nights. Husband is out of the house, the Bit is asleep and I try to map out my week as best I can. At the very least I usually know what I’m writing about for About, and I have a pretty good idea what I’m writing about over here, too. I don’t always have a plan for Craft Gossip because it’s more of a day-to-day blog, but sometimes I get a backlog of stuff to post and can see a couple of days ahead.

(As an aside, I just started using this blog calendar printable from Living Locurto this week. I’m not completely in love, but it’s prettier than a plain old to do list.)

Knowing what’s coming through the week allows me to write more when I have more time or energy because I know what needs to be done when. Of course this doesn’t work when you haven’t finished the craft you planned to write a tutorial about or the book you meant to review, but it does make it possible to work ahead if you have all the prep work done.

Priorities First

The other thing having a list and knowing what you want to publish when does for you is that it allows you to prioritize without even thinking about it. That busy day I knew I had a book review that was due that day, so I wrote it first (I did let it sit awhile before editing and sending; I’m not that crazy!).

Then I knew I had things to write that needed to post that day, so they came next. Then the next day and the next. Or sometimes I’ll do all my About work for a few days out, then all my Craft Gossip, etc. Either way you know what you need to work on now and what you’ll be doing next.

Sometimes that helps me avoid distraction because I know it’s all down on paper and that I can just go to the next thing when I’m done.

How it Ought to Work

Again ideally, I would have a big writing day like that once or twice a week, enough in advance of when things needed to post that I could spend the next day editing everything. That isn’t really the way it works, and actually since getting ahead of myself that day I haven’t managed to work ahead at all this week.

But it’s a process. Some days and weeks are more productive than others. I always have a goal of more productivity and efficiency when it comes to my writing because that leaves more time for crafting, but I also know that speed is not always an ideal.

But the first step is planning, knowing what you want to write and when you want to publish it or need to send it to another blogger or wherever you’re published. Next week we’ll look at tips for actually writing faster.

In the meantime, if you have any great resources (your own or other people’s) that can make our blogging better and more efficient, please share!

Thanks for visiting, commenting and sharing.


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