Do you ever feel other bloggers must have some kind of secret productivity superpower? I mean every person on the planet has the same 24 hours to do with as they choose so some bloggers must be doing some special magic with their hourly allotment. Is there a productivity hack to rescue your blog?
The good news is, just like most things in blogging, what others are successfully doing is usually accessible for anyone! So what are bloggers doing that enable them to post consistently, engage in social media, create amazing opt-ins, pins, and courses and still have dinner with their families every night?!
It starts with a “B” and ends with an “atch”…Batch! Do you wanna be a batch-aholic too!? I bet you do!!!
Let’s explore this amazingly easy productivity hack that is making bloggers everywhere scream for joy! Yep, it is possible to rescue your blog, just by rescuing how you spend your time!
Rescue Your Blog With This Amazingly Easy Productivity Hack
Rescue Your Blog: Why Batch?
Well, did you know that if you get distracted, you are probably not going to be able to focus again for at least 15 minutes!?
So that Facebook notification that took you away from your blog post writing… 15 minutes gone just with clicking on the notification! That phone call you could have ignored, but you answered anyway, another 15 minutes taken PLUS the time of the call.
If you really want to know where your time is going, it is likely largely consumed with all of these little 15 minute distractions that add up to major time sucks. Just go ahead and add up all the times you got distracted yesterday and think about how much blogging you could have gotten done instead had you been able to fully focus.
Now, this is when batching comes to the rescue.
Instead of time being gone here and there and before you know it everywhere there are time issues, with batching you are fully committing to a gulp of a task for a chunk of time and doing nothing but that one task.
Fully committing to one task, one goal, and seeing it through in one big chunk of time is such a time saver and efficiency igniter!
Before going into details about how batching can be combined with blogging, let’s consider the batching we already do in our daily routine to help us get more done. Hint: Most of us naturally batch all the time!
Batching You Already Do:
Running Errands – Do you try to clump errands together, so you don’t have to make multiple driving trips?
- For instance, do you ever try to go to two grocery stores, get gas, and drop off library books all in one day, all in one trip out from the house, instead of spreading all these errands out during an entire week? That’s batching!
- If you are already out of the house, in the car, driving around, might as well save yourself multiple trips into town and just get as much done in one outing as possible. Batching errands is a weekly habit of most grocery shoppers and a potential sanity-saver of many busy moms.
Doing The Dishes – Do you unload the entire dishwasher at once and then load it up again? Do you wait until there’s a group of dishes to wash instead of washing a dish every hour of the day all day?
- Most people will wash, load, unload, and put away dishes all at once, not putting a cup away one hour and then putting a fork away in another two hours and just generally doing dishes all day long. Dishes are a natural batching task that most people do and probably don’t realize it.
- Washing the dishes in batches is a process that makes the most sense for most people. Nobody wants to spend every hour every day doing dishes! Batching dish chores for a few minutes once or twice during a day makes it all easier and more productive for having a life outside of dishes!
Getting Ready – Do you get dressed and ready for the day all at once instead of throughout the day?
- This might be the most common batching task of all. When most people take a shower, get dressed, brush their teeth, do something with their hair (even if it’s a messy bun!), and possibly moisturize their face and add some makeup, all of this is usually all categorized as “getting ready” but it is also batching!
- Because the shower, one’s sink, a mirror, and a gal’s makeup are all usually in the bathroom, it just makes sense, takes less time, and allows a gal to get it done and move on with her day. Batching her “getting ready” process is incredibly useful.
- I would probably never “get ready” if I had to take a shower one hour, brush my teeth in another room across the house the next hour, and wait two hours until I could get dressed. Who wants to spread a 20-minute task out into a six-hour one?! Batching daily getting ready time is the best.
So that is why batching is awesome: We save time, energy, focus, and are able to accomplish not only the thing we want to batch but also more throughout our entire day.
Batching is fantastic. Now let’s move our batching practice out of the bathroom and into our blogging.
[bctt tweet=”I’m getting ready to batch my blog! What have you batched today?! #batching” username=”perfectplaying”]
Rescue Your Blog: How To Batch Your Blog
Before giving some suggestions for the awesomeness of batching and using it to benefit your blogging habits, perhaps you will get the most out of creating a new batching habit if you first think about how you want to batch.
A key in any productivity system is making sure it works for you so don’t skip this personalization part.
Using the above examples of running errands, doing a bunch of dishes at once, and getting ready all at one time in the morning, perhaps you can now think about how you might similarly set up a system for yourself that gets blogging tasks done more efficiently for you.
FREE Blogging Productivity Pack!
Set goals, create a plan, and REWARD your productivity!
Days, Weeks, and even Year-long tracking and rewarding!
30+ Pages of Awesome!
Seriously, this is such a pretty blogging goal setting and goal slaying pack!
FREE for a limited time!
Questions to Ask For Blog Batching:
- What blogging tasks could you group together to all get done at one time (one day, one sitting, one hour, during one child’s nap time)?
- How could you use batching to write more posts?
- How could you use batching to create that thing you’ve been wanting to create for your blog (that course, that opt-in, that freebie, that ebook, that printable, that series)?
- How could you apply batching to your blog’s social media?
- What is one area in your life you already batch well and can use as inspiration for how you can batch well with your blog?
- Is there something you’ve been postponing with your blog that you could maybe knock out this weekend in one focused blog batching session?
- If you batched your blog as well as you batched doing the dishes or getting ready for the day, how might your blog be transformed?
If you came up with some insightful answers to any of the above questions, take note of your reflections! You just might have thought of the answer to your blogging productivity issues all on your own! A few moments of reflection can work wonders in creating new habits for blogging better!
All that you could batch is unimaginable so we will address some key areas that any blogger could use to up their blogging game.
Rescue Your Blog: Blog Batching Posts
Without posts, you kind of are without a blog so using batching to create posts can be super-duper helpful!
Now before spending the entire night trying to write a bunch of posts, here are some various ways batching can be used for posts.
Batch posts by topic – For example, every Tuesday write fashion posts and every Friday write marriage posts.
Or, spend the first Monday of every month cooking and photographing a month’s worth of recipes and then spend another day that week writing up all of the posts and scheduling them, so all of your food posts are done for the entire month!
The options for batching your posts by topic are endless!
Batch posts by creative flow – Some days you just don’t want to write, and other days you feel like the words are begging to come out and you can’t get to the laptop fast enough.
Sometimes it is just wise to let your writing muse have its way and if the genius is off, do something else, but when it’s on, make way for the muse and don’t let anything interrupt!
Sarah Titus spoke of this in one of her posts which so happens to be all about batching and how this single mom and professional blogger batches her posts according to her writing whims.
Hey, you might not be able to control when inspiration strikes, but you can control your schedule such that if you suddenly feel the urge to make a post but were about to edit photos, ditch the photos for now and go into full-on writing mode – batch it up!
Batch by season – The seasons are basically a given as are the holidays that accompany them. We know Christmas is coming every December and we know spring is a great time for cleaning our entire house using the latest cleaning tips.
Consider creating posts in a batch fashion according to the upcoming season.
Suppose it’s summer (known for being a downtime for many a blogger’s blog) and you have an extra hour a week to do something more for your blog. Well, spend an hour a week doing all things pertaining to fall for your blog!
That’s right, batch by making those pumpkin decor projects, preparing those Thanksgiving printables, and making activity ideas for family-get-togethers. If September rolls around and you have 20 fall blog posts all up and ready for the fabulous fall season you might have your most successful fall yet!
With all your posts up and queued you can now work on Christmas posts, or focus on social media, or create a course for your blog, or just take some time off if you want.
The ways you could batch your blog posts should be unique to you and totally be freeing in how it creates less stress and more efficiency for how your blog runs.
In fact, a sure sign that you need to adjust your batching process is if it isn’t making things better for you.
Remember, if you get stuck thinking about how to best batch for your blog, just try to think about it in more common everyday terms.
Batching posts can be very similar to batch cooking. Just like many moms are now freezer meal cooking so they can work really hard one day to have an entire week or even an entire month of easy dinners, you can also make blog posts ahead of time, all in a day, weekend, or week, and then reap the rewards.
Batching is working well when you are feeling less stress, feeling like you’re ahead instead of behind, and freeing yourself up to focus on other things you’ve been wanting to do for your blog.
[bctt tweet=”The key to batching well is making sure you batch according to your individual needs. #blogger” username=”perfectplaying”]
Rescue Your Blog: Blog Batching The Yuck
I hate to say it, but there probably is something about blogging you kind of wish you didn’t have to do.
There is likely something that if you could, you would have somebody else do for you or you would just wave a wand and make it disappear. Batching can be great for these types of tasks.
The best illustration for this that I can think of is taking out the trash. I know, it’s not that big of a deal for many folks, but for some, taking out the trash can become a big deal. There’s something about that task that makes it not my favorite. But I don’t want trash in my house, and I’m thankful for the garbage truck that comes and takes it away every week so every week I make sure to empty all my trash cans and I often batch this.
I will go around the entire house and empty all cans, any can, and the trash goes out, and a fresh bag goes in. And you know what? I love an empty trash can! It just gives me joy, so that also motivates me to make sure the trash goes out, even though I am not particularly fond of the task.
Whatever it is for you, the thing or chore you need to do for your blog, but don’t want to do, it can be easier with batching.
Just like I know that once a week is trash week and that helps me not think about it every day which means I can think of things I do want to think about, figuring out an appointed time to regularly take care of blogging tasks you don’t naturally love can make your overall blogging to-dos more joyful.
Batch unedited drafts – For some people, writing a new post is exhilarating but finishing up a half done post can be like finishing yucky vegetables at dinner when you already ate the yummy main course.
Sometimes we just like to do the exciting part and forget about the rest. Batching can come to the rescue here. Do you have some unedited drafts sitting in your WordPress dashboard that might actually make for some awesome posts if you ever get around to finishing them? This is your chance!
Decide that one day a month, or one day a week, or for 15 minutes every other day, (whatever works for you!) you will complete as many posts as you can.
That’s right, put it in your schedule and declare yourself a finisher of posts that need to see the light of day so your readers can reap the benefits! With batching your drafts with a commitment to completion, you will likely feel a sense of accomplishment you haven’t seen in awhile.
Batch emails – Some people get scared looking at their inbox. It’s like an immediate reaction comes up from the gut, “Um, do I really want to go in there today?”
Maybe for you, it’s answering emails, maybe it’s creating an email sequence, perhaps you need to organize your emails or unsubscribe from some sources, or you need to send a bunch of emails out for possible guest posting.
Whatever your blogging email task is that you have been avoiding, avoid no longer and batch instead.
A little bit of finishing tasks that you hate getting done is better than the tasks eating away at your mind day after day and destroying your creativity in other areas.
Decide when, how, and for how long you will take care of the dreaded task, and you will feel proud that you did this for yourself and for your blog. And maybe the task will even hurt less than you thought it would… maybe.
[bctt tweet=”Instead of avoiding dreaded tasks batch them and be done in time for dinner! #batching” username=”perfectplaying”]
Batch images – I happen to love image tasks for blogging but I know many do not. By images, I am referring to anything pertaining to a picture getting on your blog. This could mean images inside your posts, for your pins on Pinterest, images for Instagram, images in your opt-ins, your eBook images, or going through all your blogging pictures you took last week and editing them, all of that is game here.
So you can absolutely rescue your blog with batching in terms of images.
We all know the visual appeal of blogging is a thing, so there is time spent getting images (whether you personally take your blog photographs or get them from somewhere), there’s the editing of images, the putting of text on images, the posting of images, heck there’s even selling of images now.
A lot of bloggers find batching any part of the image management for a blog to be insanely helpful.
For example, some bloggers will spend one day a month gathering all the images they will use for their blog and social media that month. Other bloggers will batch their Pinterest pin image creation so maybe during the weekend as they are somewhat watching a movie on the couch they will also work on creating amazing clickable Pinterest images.
Then, of course, those who are taking their own photos may wisely batch their photography by time of day, (so they take pictures every evening because of the natural light from their window) or they go crazy during the summer and take a ton of pictures to get them through the gray skies of fall and winter when their pictures would look depressing.
Whatever your image issue, batching can help.
There is likely some aspect of blogging you don’t love to pieces and kinda wish would disappear from your to-do list someday.
Until you can get rid of the blogging tasks you’d rather not do, batch them, so the pain goes by fast! Just like quickly pulling off a band-aid that can hurt like heck – the pain will go by faster if you go fast – the same with batching.
Rescue your blog, and rescue yourself, from painful blogging tasks by batching them all at once so you do them and are done and can go back to playtime on the blogging tasks you do love.
By now hopefully, you have realized at least one way in which batching might drastically transform your blogging.
Remember, batching can be for as long as you want so while some may batch an entire day dedicated to blogging, others might batch by dedicating 10 minutes every other day to a certain blog task.
The limits and guidelines are really up to you. The key is finding batching-peace for you as a unique individual with unique blogging circumstances and needs.
How long you batch, when you batch, where you batch, and what you batch should only be decided by what will work best for you, help you blog better, and enable you to achieve your blogging dreams in a more effective, stress-free, joyful way.
Happy Blog Batching!
Excited to rescue your blog with batching? *Pin* this post to keep track of all the ways you can rescue your blog with batching! If you’re a blogger always on the hunt for the best productivity hacks for your life and blog, follow Playing Perfect’s Pinterest Page!
Want some more helpful blogging ideas? Here are 50+ helpful blog page ideas!
FREE Blogging Productivity Pack!
Your time is precious!
Take control of your blogging! Set goals, create a plan, and REWARD your productivity!
Days, Weeks, and even Year-long tracking and rewarding!
30+ Pages of Awesome!
FREE for a limited time!