Planning To Blog

I had quite a long hiatus from blogging.  From the beginning of October of 2019 through the end of March of 2020, I had a grand total of four blog posts, most of which said I was too busy to blog.  Since the beginning of April, I’ve become much more consistent.  How am I managing that?

Simple – I have to plan.  A lot.

Previously, I was able to keep up on blogging by waiting until the week of, or even the night before, and writing on whatever came into my head.  If I had no topic, I’d scour other blogs for ideas or write about how I had no ideas.  It was all scattershot, and it led to my blogging demise when life got hectic(as life tends to do).

It wasn’t that I never had good ideas to blog, but I never wrote them down, thinking instead that I’d just remember them.  Nope, never worked out(turns out my memory isn’t that good).  So the biggest change now is that I have a slip of paper on my desk, and anytime I get a blogging idea, I write it down.  If I’m upstairs, I walk downstairs to my office to write it down.  If I’m out walking my dog, I put the idea into my phone(I don’t always do that because, honestly, I’m an old fuddy-duddy and prefer physical written words).

As I start to gather ideas, I look to see how many times the next month my blog is scheduled for.  I number my ideas until I have enough for the next month.  And then…I get to work.  I try to write three or four posts in a night or weekend that I can then save and later transfer to this blog.  I then cut and paste, working in the links where necessary, and set for a later publication date.  I can move stuff around if I need to for breaking news and the like, but it keeps me ahead.  It’s working so far – let’s see if I can keep it up.