Month of Guests 2013: Death, Books And Tea

When I first got into blogging, I thought it would be a simple thing-read a book (as I was doing anyway) and formulate my thoughts into words. Move on, easy as that. I soon discovered how wrong I was. Not only is there reading and writing reviews, there’s formatting posts, web design, maintenance and emails to reply to. Then there’s the more fun things-reading other people’s posts, participating in memes, and chatting to everyone. It’s hard to believe that there’s enough time in the day for this, and everything else going on in my life. But somehow, I fit it in.

I think one thing that helps me is my daily routine. I wake up early, and read when I’m getting ready. I have twenty minute bus journey and I read on that. I get into school half an hour early, so I read or write during that time if I don’t have homework. Another twenty minutes on the bus home. Maybe an hour between bed and sleep. I have a lot of time to do this all.

I multitask a lot. I use the kindle’s text-to-speech function and free books so I can listen to stories while doing things that require me to use both hands. By getting a lot of my reading and post writing done, I can do things quickly on the computer.

The multitasking doesn’t stop there. Some nights consist of me with a show or DVD playing in one side of my screen and a word document in the other. I hate just staring at a screen without doing anything else, because I get bored and feel unproductive. Working on something at the same time gives me justification for spending hours on the computer. Yes, this has led me to miss a couple of major plot points, because I was trying to decipher my handwriting, but overall, I save time.

Prioritising things helps. I (almost) always do my homework before blogging, because doing fun things after you’ve done boring things always makes the fun things feel more fun.

Sometimes this isn’t enough, and blogging does feel really stressful. The way I deal with this is taking a break. Reminding myself that blogging is an optional thing, not a mortal obligation. I give myself breaks when I need it-around exams, around times when I get bored of churning out reviews, around times when I find an obsession that really really takes over my life. leaving the blog alone for a couple of days, or weeks, or anything, means I get more done with non-bloggy things, and most likely a new love of the blog!

In conclusion, there’s lots of things involved in blogging, and I use a lot of techniques to save time, but when this doesn’t work, I take a bit of a break. And that’s how I make it work.