How To Find Time To Write 20 Blog Posts A Month

This calendar year I’ve been publishing a new post on 35hunter every 36 hours, which averages about 20 post a month.

I’ve found this schedule is a very good balance for me between being able to keep my ideas flowing and giving them more coherence in the form of blog posts, and not feeling overwhelmed at having to write so often.

Here are some tips on how I’ve been able to make this work.

– I don’t write exactly every 36 hours.

The ability to schedule publishing on WordPress has been invaluable, meaning I’ve been able to smooth out my more erratic writing schedule into a very consistent flow of new posts, ie one every 36 hours.

It allows for the inevitable peaks and troughs in how often I can write – day to day and week to week.

The few occasions I’ve been down to zero posts in the scheduling pipeline have usually been because I keep starting, mostly writing, but not quite finishing new posts.

So I might find I have perhaps 5 or 6 posts that each need a 20 minute tidy up to be ready.

It’s far more typical for me to have 3-5 posts queued up.

– I use different sized writing sessions for different purposes. 

As I just mentioned, sometimes I have a handful of almost finished posts that just need a little editing and a few photos adding to be ready to go.

This kind of activity can be done is smaller, more casual sessions, of only 10-20 mins.

Then other times when I know I have a larger chunk of time available, I dive in to the actual writing far more and can write the bulk of a post in one sitting.

– Each post doesn’t have to be 3000 words.

Although sometimes I find it hard to condense what I want to share into less than 3000 words (like the recent post on using M42 lenses on digital cameras), more typical is a post of 600-750 words, which is of course only 20-25% the size.

These don’t take anything like as long, especially as I usually have the bulk of the post formulated in my head already.

Sometimes I write an ever shorter post with just a single idea or question, or just share One Frame.

All of this means I can maintain a new post every 36 hours and hopefully provide a variety of lengths of post for different readers, some who prefer shorter, snappier ones, others who like something longer and more meaty to get their teeth into, and some who just like the photographs.

– I dedicate at least a couple of evenings in the week to writing. 

Now when I say evenings, by the time the kids are all organised and in bed this begins at 730 at the earliest, and rarely goes beyond 930.

But having those chunks of time fairly consistently (it’s not always the same evenings) allows a decent amount of writing to be done each week, and for me is preferable to sitting in front of the TV watching something I’m really not interested in (which is about 99% of TV!)

– I don’t write (or indeed do anything 35hunter related) at the weekend.

This might seem counter intuitive, having two whole days off from 35hunter to help maintain a consistent output.

But as much as I love writing and publishing and responding to comments from you, I just love that time off to forget all about it, and focus completely on family stuff without glancing at my phone to check for comments, or using my MacBook at all.

I know for a fact that having this break each week keeps me more fresh and hungry to write and share more than if there were no limits on my 35hunter time, and it over spilled into every day and evening.

I’ve written more about unplugging previously.

– I make the most of “dead” time. 

Two particular occurrences come to mind here.

First, time at work, either before the day’s work has started, or during breaks in between. This is often a great time to check in on and reply to comments, or write a section of a new post.

As I write directly into WordPress, it’s very easy to pick up where I left off across multiple devices.

The second time is during my son’s trampolining classes. He’s in a squad that trains three times a week, for between 2h15 and 3 hours at a time.

I take him and stay the whole time for at least one of these sessions each week, and currently am going along about half way through the other two (after I’ve finished work) to be there to pick him up, after my wife has dropped him off with our older child and new baby, then headed home again earlier.

In between watching his turns on the trampoline, I can get considerable amounts of writing and editing done, probably currently about 4-5 hours of focused time each week.

– Finally, I ride the magic of momentum.

This is too vital to not mention here, in fact it’s so important I recently gave it a whole post of its own which I invite you read if you haven’t already – The Magnificent Magic Of Momentum.

These are some of the ways I’ve been able to publish a new post every 36 hours – a total of over 150 posts already this year, almost as many as the whole of 2018. 

I hope you can take something useful from it for your own blogging – or indeed photography –  activities.

How much time do you spend blogging each week, and how do you fit it in? 

Please let us know in the comments below (and don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of new comments via email” box to follow the conversation).

Thanks for looking.

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