I'm going to try out a new experimental timetable for next week based on cycling through a certain minimum amount of different key tasks that I want to do..
The main categories of task I need to do are....
- Writing new posts
- Updating old posts (long and short)
- Hive and LEO stuff
- Planning and background work and other fund stuff
The full task list looks like this which cycles through the above.....
1-11 are really the ESSENTIALS and the idea is that I try and get these done by early Thursday and that then gives me the later half of the week to do the more enjoyable and slow burn stuff, OR I can go back and pick from 1-11 and work on anything that takes my fancy!
I want to write three new posts a week, in three areas: education, culture and identity and then one about a contemporary event in the news, but I think it makes sense to do my major updating first, of a few posts, and then write based on what I've updated because that will show me where the gaps in the blog are.
I've been flexible with the number I write in one go because sometimes posts stand alone while other topics lend themselves to a mini-series.
For updating I like to update in a major way generally - a thorough revamp of old posts but that takes time so I can only do a few a week, but it's also good for me to do quicker updates of other posts - just for SEO - so literally adding in pictures to posts that don't have them or SEO excerpts.
Back end work means checking broken links and doing other churn stuff to improve SEO.
I've put planning after all the main blog writing because after finishing all of the main writing and updating for one cycle, what I need to focus on next will be fresh in the mind!
Cycling to hopefully improve productivity...
The idea of doing a cycle is that this will hopefully speed up how productive I am - I start on Monday at number 1 and BLAST through as much as possible maintaining quality, and try to get through to 14 as quickly as possible, and then go back to one.
There's almost no way I'll get 1-14 done by end Weds, but sometimes maybe if I go quickly I may get to 11 and then just crack on with another partial round.
Over the last couple of weeks I've just tried to do all of the above (excluding 12-14) in a week and just got a bit slack.
Time to push myself going forwards!