I’ve published two posts a week every week since at least the beginning of 2017, maybe earlier. Every week without fail. In the absence of doing any promotion, I’m finding the strategy of very regular posting works wonders for my statistics. But it’s now September 16th and I’ve spent the last three weeks in Russia. Still kept up those two posts a week, haven’t I? I realised in late June that I had quite a lot on this summer and I would need to spend a lot of time writing and scheduling posts. As of when I started writing this particular post, it’s July 9th in real life. How I organise my blog: featuring twice-weekly posts, full-time real job, Brownies, Rangers and having a life.
It’s all about planning, organisation and an over-inflated sense of what a catastrophe it would be if I miss a post.
I use OneNote and my diary. Those are my two tools and they’re pretty much it. At the beginning of every year, I open a new tab in my I Am A Polar Bear digital notebook in OneNote, make twelve pages and list all the dates a post is due. I’ve done that for 2020 already and as I said, it’s July.
On each of those dates, I add a series of boxes. Theme, title, SFISP (started, finished, images, scheduled, published). Next I fill in the Theme boxes. I have a set of rough categories that I keep mostly as a backup. Anything exciting or new gets priority but if I don’t have anything I specifically want to write about, I fall back on those Themes. They change every year. 2019 has The A-Z of Iceland every other Thursday. This is the point at which I put all the letters in that schedule.
I like to have all my Titles for the next month filled in before the first half of the preceding month. They can all get moved or replaced right up until I go to bed the night before they’re published but I need something written down because I need to know what I need to think about and when I need to think about it.
Then come the SFISP boxes. Images is always the last thing I do – graphics and images are not my strong point. GCSE Graphics prepared me for designing knives and wine bars, not blog layouts and thumbnails. Once SFISP are all ticked off, I’m done. In 2020, in an attempt to promote, I’m adding “linked on social media” boxes to the schedule.
Then I have the same thing copied into my paper diary for looking at and musing on at work. Actually, the Title boxes mostly get filled in at work and coped to OneNote on my phone.
Then there’s the writing. Most posts begin in minuscule writing on A6 pieces of scrap paper. I’m copying this post from two of those scraps right now. The real writing mostly happens at weekends. It’s pretty rare that I’m going to come home from my paid job and spend a non-Girlguiding evening on my unpaid job.
If I’m really organised, I like to have a whole month’s posts finished and scheduled and ready to go (and forget about) by the end of the first weekend of that month. Recently just getting a week’s posts ready to go by bedtime on Sunday has been a bit of a trial so it’s quite the novelty to see eight or ten posts sitting in my scheduled pile.
How do I decide what to write when? Well, I know when I’m busy and I can sit and stare at a month’s posts laid out in my notebook and at my calendar and then note in my diary Subject/title, S-M16. That’s this one. September, Monday 16th, written in a particular day in my diary for me to do. Other than that, I just make sure I’ve got both this week’s posts finished before I go to bed on Sunday.
Russia is another matter. I’ve printed out calendar pages for June, July and August, stuck them back to back and then gone through all the posts due up until the end of September to figure out when I’m available and when a deadline for a particular post is due. Some of them – the ones about Edinburgh, for example – can’t be written before a particular date either, such as before I’ve been to Edinburgh and then the ultimate deadline for this three-month batch is bedtime on August 22nd. So I’ve now designated dates for every single post and colour-coded it. Yellow for June, green for July, blue for August and orange for September. It doesn’t look so daunting like that, especially when I cross them off early – and I’ve crossed quite a few of them off early. The date for writing this post isn’t July 9th, it’s sometime in August, for example.
Let’s have a quick detour to my tools. I know a lot of people swear by Trello. I know people make some quite elaborate spreadsheets. That doesn’t work for me, even though I’m a great spreadsheet fan. I don’t know why. I’ve tried other things and this works for me. I like OneNote. I have an entire notebook for my blog, with the above-mentioned tab for the annual schedule. There’s a tab for lists (ideas for the A-Z, books to read & review, ideas for new regular series), one for drafts and others for anything I want in that moment. I know I could do all this in Excel just as well – probably better – but OneNote is designed to be a kind of digital subject notebook and that works for me.
In the future, I got back from Russia yesterday but I’m away the next two weekends as well so the next post I write that isn’t scheduled weeks or months in advance is going to be my first post on Moscow, which is in my plan for October 7th.