How to Find the Time to Blog (When You Have No Time)

 

Find the time to blog when your time is filled with other commitments. 5 Proven Tips to free up your time!

This is it, this is the answer to finding all kinds of time to blog, even if you think you couldn’t possibly fit anything else into your busy schedule. Get ready to free up some time!

 

 

The alarm clock rings signaling a new day is starting. You pull yourself out of bed, get yourself ready, get the kids ready, perform the usual morning chaos dance to get out the door and to work on time. You put in your hours at your job, clock out for the day, pick up the kids and do the nighttime scramble of dinner, dishes, baths, and bed. You finally sit down and realize you didn’t find the time to blog today when that’s really all you wanted to do, and now you are way too tired to even think about blogging.

This is exactly what I used to struggle with too. You have all this passion for starting a blog, building a business and having an awesome creative outlet, but just can’t find the time to do it all. So how do you fix it when you feel like you are already stretched to the max?

 

Know Your Motivation

This is true for anything you are trying to accomplish in your life. You have to know WHY you are blogging. Is it to spread your message? Supplement your income? Replace your full-time income? Become a teacher? Have a creative outlet to keep your sanity? The reason you want to start a blog is very personal and there is no right or wrong. Just make sure you know your exact reason.

Your motivation for blogging needs to be more important and more influential than any other excuse you could use for not investing your time in your blog (ie. sleeping in, watching a movie, dinner out with friends, etc.). Your reason needs to be bigger than anything you could convince yourself is more important than your blog.

Are you trying to make a full-time income so you can stay at home with your kids? That’s a pretty good reason to tell your friends, “No, I can’t go to dinner and a movie tonight. I have some work I need to do.” You need to believe sacrificing a night out to work on your blog, will get you one step closer to staying at home with your kids. That needs to be the most important thing in your life right now.

 

Start Time Blocking

What is time blocking?

Time blocking is essentially organizing your day by sections or “blocks” of time instead of one very long “to-do” list. This method of scheduling your time with a specific purpose will allow prioritizing of your tasks, increasing your productivity and improving your organization.

I am convinced, once you try this, you will never go back to your old “to-do” list.

How can you start time blocking?

• Assess your current schedule: Look at your current daily schedule. If you needed to find just 2 hours a day to blog, where could you find that?

Example: My current schedule

Wake up 6 AM – Morning scramble with 2 kids and off to work I go!

Work 8 AM – 5 PM (1 Hour lunch break)

Home 6 PM – Nighttime rush of dinner, dishes, baths, bedtime

Together time with my husband 8 pm until bed.

I am not a morning person…AT ALL. When I was looking for 2 hours a day to commit to blogging, I originally chose two hours every night after the kids went to bed. Then after talking to my husband about it, he was not on board with me taking away our time together for blogging. So, a new solution? I found an hour of time VERY early in the morning and an hour over my lunch. This allowed me to blog without sacrificing time with my husband.

Your schedule will not look like my schedule, but the point is, to look at your day and see where you have pockets of time you could squeeze an hour out of. I am positive you have more time than you realize. Even if that means you have to get up early when you are NOT a morning person or stay up late if you are not a night owl. If you want this, you will find the time.

• Start using a planner (I like paper planners the best!) to block your time.

If you are new to time blocking, it is exactly what it says it is. You are “blocking out” chunks of your time with a designated purpose or task. During those chunks of time, you only do the one task you have decided to do.

The best way I have found to do this is having a written day planner and before the week starts, writing down the time I have committed to blogging and what I will be working on during that piece of time.

Designating your blog time to specific tasks will keep you from sitting down to blog and spending half of your time just trying to figure out what you should do.

 

 

Stay Focused

When you are in those pockets of time you have designated to blogging, make it count! If you are taking time away from other areas of your life (kids, husband, friends, personal time) to blog, you need to make it worth it.

If you are in your “scheduled” blogging time, give it your absolute focus. Put your phone away, shut off Facebook notifications, close the door, put on headphones, whatever it takes to focus your attention. Your goal during those blocks of time is to work on a single task to accomplish as much as possible within that time block.

I have been absolutely amazed at how time blocking has allowed me to get so much more done than I thought possible. Instead of having a checklist and just working my way through, my time is scheduled and for each block, I work like crazy on my specific task for that given time.

With supercharged focus, you can accomplish so much more in a short amount of time. The key to this is no distractions. Anything less than 100% of your attention focused on blogging during your “blogging time,” would basically translate into robbing time from your family for no reason.

 

Create Accountability

If you are truly committed to finding the time to blog consistently, you need to have an accountability person. It can be anyone you trust to be completely honest with you (your husband, friend, teenage daughter), and check in on your progress. Having someone to keep you accountable will keep you from hitting snooze when you should be getting out of bed an hour earlier.

You should want to impress your accountability partner, not disappoint them. There have been so many mornings my alarm has gone off at 4 am, I had just been up at 3 am to feed my 3-month-old, but I dragged my butt out of bed to avoid disappointing my husband (my accountability partner). I don’t ever want to have to tell him, “Hey, I just didn’t feel like getting up this morning so I didn’t blog and am not moving us any closer to a better life for our family.”

Again, your accountability partner doesn’t have to be your husband, but it definitely should be someone you don’t want to disappoint. Having accountability is a very strong motivator to finding the time to blog and stick with it!

 

Set goals

Goal setting is one of THE most important things you can do to find the time to blog. Figure out where you want to go and create a visual reminder for motivation and focus. If your goal is to quit your job and stay home with your kids, keep a picture of you with your kids as a reminder. Every time you look at that picture, you will keep that fire ignited to keep going with your blog. It will help you find the time to blog no matter what life throws at you.

Having goals will help you figure out what steps you need to take to get from where you are to where you want to be. This, in turn, will dictate what you do with your time. When you start implementing those steps to work toward your goals, the time you are putting into blogging will suddenly seem completely worth it.

When you start seeing results, the sacrifice of designating your time to blog won’t seem like such a burden, and I would even bet you will find more time to commit to blogging.

 

Are you ready to get started?

Finding the time to blog may seem like an impossible task, but you can totally do it! Once I implemented all of these tips, what I thought would be impossible became completely do-able. I found more time that I realized I had. I even added a part-time job to my schedule to help pay for some of my blogging expenses (crazy, I know)! Figure out why you want to blog and let that be your motivation to find AND MAKE time in your schedule for what you are driven to do. Time blocking was a total game-changer for me and I know it can help you too. Make some goals, find someone to keep you in check and GO! You got this!

 

Do you have any awesome tips for finding more time to blog?

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Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m a mom, wife, veterinarian and finance blogger. I am a budgeting master on a mission to teach women the skills to become financially confident and live the life they want. One of the things our readers love most is the focus on planning to get ahead of life’s expenses rather than constantly doing damage control when things come up. I blog about budget mastering, debt conquering and expense planning to end financial stress at www.BudgetwithRachel.com.