Managing the Blog Madness Without Going Mad

We've all read somewhere that we should be blogging, right? And so like the good little children we are, we created our beautiful blogs or websites and wrote posts filled with inspiration, humor, and of course, wisdom.

Then somewhere along the line, we realized we needed friends to actually read our outbursts of brilliance. So we proceeded to read up on how to increase our blog traffic, which opened a whole new world of must-do's. You know how it goes...Visit other blogs, comment on them, then revisit them, then comment on them again, then sacrifice your firstborn. Er, something like that.

Now I'm being sort of snarky here, and in all honesty, I love all the friends I've made through blogging and would sacrifice my firstborn for them...My firstborn being Finny the fish, of course. But we can all relate to this time struggle, right?

Jody Hedlund addressed this topic on her blog recently and had some great thoughts, one of which was the importance of prioritizing interactions. So I wanted to share one trick I've found to do this, particularly in the world of blogging. But to better appreciate it, I want to show you my former life.

Here's the typical scenario. I get up at 6:30, do my morning time with God while eating breakfast, then cram in as much email and blog visits as I can before my kids get up and eat breakfast at 8:00. After that, I turn on Mickey Mouse and let my kids veg until lunch so I can finish reading more blog posts. Then I slap some PB&J together and put the kids down for naps, during which point I read more blog posts, make more comments, and wonder where my actual writing time went.

Can you relate?

Now, picture this scenario. During my morning cram session of email and blogging, I do this. I open up my dashboard and Twitter account in a separate internet window. Then I do a quick scroll through the blog roll, right clicking on the posts that are of interest or high priority, and select "Open in new tab".

Important note: I do not read the posts at this point.

Then I skim through Twitter and do the same thing. All new tabs. When I'm finished, I may have 10 tabs open or 50 tabs open, depending on the day.

Here's how the rest of my day progresses. If I'm home with the kiddos, I take those short snippets of time while my son is crashing hotwheels together and I read one of the tabs, comment, then click the X. One down, 9 to go. I continue to do this throughout the day so that by naptime, if the stars align, I can write.

Here's another scenario. Say I don't have kids at home, and I have a full day to devote to writing. (Did I say "scenario"? I meant to say "in my dreams".) So I spend my day like this: Focused writing for 45 minutes, then a 15 minute break which may include getting up and stretching, grabbing a snack, and visiting a few of those blogs I'd opened earlier.

See how easy that was? Focused time. By opening all the items of interest at the start of my day, I can more easily budget my time and sneak in my blog reading in little snippets. And it helps me avoid getting sucked into my blog roll or my Twitter account for five hours straight and never leaving. If my list of must-reads is ridiculously long on a given day, I copy the links into an email and save them for another day.

How do you manage the blog madness? Any tips or tools to share that can save someone else time in the blogsophere?

*Blog & Hourglass photos by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

**Sandwich photo by Rawich / FreeDigitalPhotos.net