Distractions
Blogging Requires Focus and Thought, Interruptions Can Slow You Down And Cost You Money
There are very few things more annoying to a blogger than having a good idea, being on a role writing a post, and constantly being interrupted. These interruptions can slow down your posts or worse, make you lose your train of thought and forget what you were writing about. Here are some of the top distractions a blogger usually can face. How often do you experience these? And how can you minimize them?
1) E-mail - If you are on the internet, and have no one looking over your shoulder, it is tempting to get on your e-mail and get some personal business done. Big companies are faced with this all the time. People are busy taking care of their personal lives and not their business. If e-mail is a distraction to you, learn to limit yourself. Only check your e-mail after you have gotten a post or two out. After you have done a few of your most important action items for the day.
2) E-Bay -Ebay can be as much of a time pit as it is a money pit. Although it can be nice to find some great deals on ebay, you need to watch out just how great those deals are when you factor in all the time you spend looking for them. Once again, if you are blogging seriously you need to treat it as a business, only start taking breaks once you have your most important tasks accomplished.
3) Bloglines / Google Reader- If you have an hour for blogging, how much of it do you spend writing content, and how much do you spend reading other blogs? Although other blogs can be a great source of inspiration, as well as backlinks and traffic, the majority of the time you have available for blogging should be spent on blogging! If you spend too much time reading, you are little more than a voyeur.
4) Analytics / Adsense - New bloggers are much more at risk to these distractions than experienced bloggers. After you have been working at a site for a while you can begin to lose the urge to constantly check your traffic stats and your earnings reports. But sometimes new bloggers spend as much time checking reports as writing content! Although it is essential to know how people are getting to your site, it is just as important to put up new material to make sure that they keep coming back. If you find yourself spending too much time checking your stats, try taking a break. Limit yourself to only checking your stats at the end of every week. You will get more work done, and will be less distracted by short term fluctuations.
5) Television - Bloggers working from home often have a multifunction room. It can be temping to “Make the most of your time” by multi-tasking and working on your blog while you are watching your television show. However the problem with this is that the television can take most of your concentration, making it very hard to generate content with any speed at all. A better use of time would be to multi-task television with something that doesn’t require concentration, like exercise. Exercising whenever you watch TV can free up time that you would other wise be working out to work on your webpage.
6) Family & Pets - Family can sometimes have a hard time understanding that just because you are home, doesn’t mean that you all the time in the world to deal with the little everyday problems that everyone encounters. It can be extremely frustrating to a blogger to be working on a post and be constantly interrupted to take the dog out or wash the dishes. To remedy this you need to set up a fixed schedule. When you are blogging, you are blogging and not available for chores. However when you are done blogging, leave it behind and don’t worry about it for the rest of the day.
7) New Tools / Software - Upgrading to the latest software can be great. But if you spend so much time installing it or playing with its features that it is eating into your work time you need to rethink. After all the reason that you got the software in the first place was probably to save time. Next time you are thinking about getting a new piece of software thinking that it will make you more efficient, be sure to take into account the time you will need to spend installing it.
Hopefully minimizing some of those distractions will help you blog more efficiently. Have distractions in other parts of your life? Lifehack has recently posted its 10 Ten Sources Of Interruptions
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