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Tanya is the blogger behind Blogelina.com where she works to help other moms earn an income from their blogs. Balancing blogging and family life is overwhelming for a lot of mom bloggers. Today, Tanya shares some helpful advice on how to get it all done.
Learning time management as a mom blogger
As a mother of two little ones and a blogger working to earn a full-time income, I’ve learned a lot about time management over the past couple of years. Finding that precarious balance between family life and working at home is such a challenge!
Here are a few tricks I’ve learned that help me make the most of my blogging time:
Set Specific Goals – Yearly goals, monthly goals, daily goals. I like to plan for the big picture and the break it down into manageable bites. The more specific you can make your goals, the more you’ll see results in your blogging. If you want to increase your followers by 100 in the next month, you can plan for what you’ll do this week to reach that goal. Then, what promoting will you do today to reach your weekly goal?
Keep Blogging Hours – And Stick To Them! This can be really difficult to do, but I have decided that when my kiddos are awake, I am not blogging. For me, I do my blogging early in the morning, during quiet time/nap time in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening, if I have to. Since I know I have about 4 hours a day to devote to blogging, I can plan my blogging time more efficiently. I prioritize my tasks for each day, too, so that I’m sure I’m getting the most important ones done first.
Write Your To-Do List the Night Before – This has helped me so much in being more efficient! I’m not much of a morning person and a big chunk of my blogging time is done early in the morning. Having a ready-to-go list of things I need to do on my blog when I drag myself out of bed in the morning, gets me started on task right away. Otherwise, I would groggily sit at the computer and waste at least half an hour just trying to remember what I needed to start with.
Plan Ahead – This includes planning ahead with your blogging and with your home chores. I keep at least one meal either in the freezer or in the pantry, ready to throw into the oven. This is for those days when you’re just getting barely getting everything done – at least, you know you have dinner already taken care of!
Also, with my blogging, I try to schedule my posts at least two weeks in advance. That way, if one of the kids is sick, or they’re up a lot at night, for whatever reason, I can take a morning or day off blogging and it won’t affect my blog much.
Streamline Your Tasks As Much As Possible – Find out what time-wasters might be eating your minutes away and get rid of them. For me, one big thing that eats my time is dealing with my inbox. If I’m reading an email, I try to do what I need to deal with it right at that time. Clicking the “mark as unread” option so I can reply later has just added more time to my working with that one email. If I respond or delete right away, I don’t have to think about it anymore.
What Are Your Time-Saving Tips?
Please share in the notes below how you manage to “get it all done”!
About the author
Tanya is the blogger behind Blogelina.com. She loves blogging – and also enjoys helping other stay-at-home moms learn how to make money working from home. Her popular Profitable Blogging for Beginners Online Class (which you can take right now for free!) has helped hundred of bloggers see more success with their blogs.
Krista says
Hi Tanya,
Thanks for the helpful time management tips. I am a new blogger and I find that I do waste precious time at the computer. I know that planning ahead will help this and now I have the motivation and resource to implement it.
I’ll also check out your online course for mom bloggers, it seems interesting.
Thanks again!
Cher says
I need to get a better handle on my inbox too.
Jo-Lynne {Musings of a Housewife} says
Great advice. I have been implementing time blocking, and that REALLY helps b/c I tend to do too many things at once and feel like I’m accomplishing nothing till the end of the day. I need to get a lot better about setting work hours, though.