Lately, I’ve been working on improving my efficiency and my productivity. Very specifically, I’m trying to iron out the wrinkles that come from suddenly being in a situation where I’ve run out of time and have something due. For some kinds of work, this is difficult. For blogging and writing, I’m finding that there are plenty of ways to get things together. I just have to use the right tools.
Schedule Your Blog Posts
I just wrote about the new WordPress editorial calendar plugin. This is probably the easiest way to schedule your blog posts. But if you aren’t using that plugin, it’s still easy to set your post up to go live in the future.
Find this little edit button above the publish button:
Click it, and you’ll see this:
Just set the date to a time and day that make sense to you and your audience. (I post at two different times of day more than any other: 4:30AM local time and 2:30PM local time. I don’t really have science behind this, but it seemed like two times of day to slide in some content that might get your attention.)
You Can Even Schedule Your Mentions of the Post
Recently, I had to use Hootsuite, because my Twitter software of choice had stopped working temporarily due to a glitch on Twitter’s side of the equation. I poked around and found that there’s a feature that allows you to schedule tweets. Here’s a quick snap of it:
I haven’t used many of the automated tools in Twitter, because I prefer the medium to be a lot more humanized. I have a somewhat more automated Twitter account, @broganmedia, that blurts out my blog posts when they go live, plus some other sharing features, but my main Twitter account, @chrisbrogan, has been 100% me.
Just for the sake of trying it, I scheduled a few tweets. One was to help out my friend, Colin Bower. I’ve got a tweet pointing to this call to action post scheduled over the next 20 days at different times, to try and keep this information front and center. It seemed like a noble thing to do.
I’m debating whether or not I want to schedule a tweet to coincide with the publishing of a post, but something more nuanced than just an automated blurt of the post title. I’m leaning towards “no,” because my account is personable, but I’m also seeing why having at least one tweet mentioning a new post would save me worrying about giving it a good send off. We’ll see how I end up resolving this one.
But the Option Exists to Use Scheduling Tools
And that’s the big point. You never know what the day is going to serve you. If creating consistent, useful content matters to you, then don’t let the day’s whims get in the way of publishing your work. When the mood strikes and you write a second amazing post after already writing the day’s post, schedule it for the future. Get into the habit of doing this. See if you can write two or three posts at every occasion when you find time to write. The practice will improve your writing ability over time.
Oh, and I wrote this on 9/9/2010, so I’m practicing what I preach.
What do you think?