Yesterday’s post reminded me about what a time sink blogging can be.
When you are blogging, and trying to do a good job of it, conventional assumptions about effective time management go out the window.
Good time managers minimize activities that steal time from tackling important long term goals and high priority short term activities. Another rule of thumb is to not start your day off with time sinks because they inevitably take over the day.
Wading through email is an example of this type of time sink and so is blogging. One of the rules of effective blogging is to first be a good "listener" (see yesterday’s MarketingProfs post by T.J. McCue Blogging Baby Steps). This takes time.
Maybe others have a better way, what I do is monitor hundreds if not thousands of RSS feeds for specific keywords (not as laborious as it sounds since I use FeedDemon to help sift through the feeds), regularly visit my favorite blogs, and also scan email newsletters and other sources of info, adding a serendipitous information discovery element to feed my blogging muse.
After the listening part is done you need to come up with an original concept or commentary and then write the thing.
I hope my boss is not reading this (actually, I have begged him to read my blog) but the above falls into the category of Great Big Honking Time Sink.
So if blogging renders Time Management an oxymoron, why even bother?
If you are in PR, you need to blog. I will explain why I think this is so in tomorrow’s post.
