iThoughts

You have a blog now. Yay! You have nice ideas. Yay! But you just don’t blog. Doh! Why’s that? Maybe you’re missing some basic techniques to get it rolling. I made a short list for you that might help you to blog more often. We’ll use some GTD later on.

1.) Like your blog. That means: Have a blog  design you like, have plugins that get the job done, have everything set up so it runs smoothly. If you don’t like your blog, you’re most likely not willing to invest much time in it.

2.) Know what to focus on. I don’t say “make a cooking blog”. Just know what you like to write about, so you can get the feeling that the readers will like to follow your content. Most of this is about motivating yourself to write.

3.) GTD (Getting Things Done) can help us with some simple methods and rules we should use.

3.1) Use a ToDo list that supports contexts, and everytime you have an idea, write a task into that context (call it “blogging” for example). Then, when you actually have some time, open that blogging context and begin writing. Due to having a “flow” you can often write multiple posts a time and schedule them with your in blog scheduler. (There’s usually a link somewhere in the writing-area, that say “publish now” or something like this, here you can set a time when the post should go live).

3.2) GTD tells us that Tasks should be “accomplishable”. So break down your blogpost-idea (that might be “write a guide for life”, which is way too much for a blogpost) into smaller chunks that you can handle in one writing session. Should your ToDo-list support nested lists (most computer-based lists don’t), you can write down these chunks as subtasks.

You shouldn’t plan on writing too long posts anyways. Usually you’ll be able to write more text then you thought about, and people only have so much time to read it.

3.3) If you don’t know what to write anymore and it really seems to be just two or three sentences, just don’t finish that post and keep it as a draft. Postpone the writing. There will be some creative time, when you just open your drafts and the words come flowing out. As it is saved in your drafts, you can easily go over them when you write posts the next time and will maybe have enough motivation and inspiration to go on.

3.4) Write the task title so it motivates you to take action. Also try to note as much of your essential ideas down when you enter your task-title, so you can later remember what you thought about when you jotted it down. Better than the title “New flat description” is “Describe new flat (surrounding, first day incident with neighbors, bath broken)”.

3.5) Throw away ideas that clutter your list and that you didn’t even begin writing on for more than two month. These entries will only clutter your list, and if it didn’t motivate you to write a post then you usually can delete it. Maybe the idea will come back later, but till then, keep your ToDo-list as clean as possible. Did I tell you to put this in a special context? This way your blogging-stuff won’t clutter your usual contexts.

Thats all! I can only add that you should be generall interested in something you’d like to write about. Your writing will get better, and if you’re blogging in a different language even that language might get better over time. Now go and write down some ideas!

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