In Dan Kennedy’s book No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs one of the main secrets he shares about getting things done is to put those tasks on your calendar. It’s pretty common to map out a day or a week; however, he suggests when you choose your goals and strategies, take it a step further and map the tasks or activities out onto a calendar a month at a time. This way you focus your time on the activities that are most important to fulfilling your goals. If my memory serves me right, Dan Kennedy maps his time out a year at a time.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just talk about the blog…and getting it written. If you just wait until you have the time or inspiration strikes you, your blog won’t get written or it will get written sporadically. Whether your marketing plan calls for writing 2 or 5 entries a week, the key to getting this done is to schedule it on to your calendar and then let no one or nothing interrupt that time. It’s a firm writing appointment.
After a while your body and mind gets used to the routine. It starts to anticipate the writing time and prepare for it. I’ve been writing my blog and / newsletter on Friday mornings for years. Every so often I write a list of blog topics and if other topics crop up at other times I add them to the list.
Since I’m giving practical advice, I’ll tell you that my calendar is color coded with one color for appointments, phone calls and meetings and another for task time. Actually, I also have a color for family activities. (I used to keep a separate family calendar and when family events happened on a week day I would inevitably double book myself. It would frustrate me enormously.) There are a group of tasks I do every week that make my business grow–those include follow up calls, scheduling 1:1’s, writing blogs entries and articles, etc. and all of those are calendared a month at a time.
Don’t just take Dan Kennedy’s or my word for it. Many other famous writers had a regular writing time…
Next I’ll write about frequency of blogging.