Be More Productive: Cut Out These 5 Productivity Sins

Are you always struggling to find time to write your next blog posst?

Even when you do find time, you have to rush your post to get it live?

You are not alone, the majority of bloggers have day jobs or other commitments that limit the amount of time they have available to produce quality content for their blog. The big problem with this is that rushing to get posts live can often result in a poorer quality of post and severe knock-on effects for your blog.

The good news is that you can free up a considerable amount of blogging time by cutting down on a few time-wasting activities that we are all guilty of. Chances are you commit at least one of the 5 sins I am going to outline below, if you can stop doing these 5 things you will free up more time for blogging and become a more productive blogger at the same time, this will enable you to write higher quality posts that will help to grow your blog.

The 5 Deadly Productivity Sins

1. Checking Stats: Be honest, how many times a day do you check your analytics, Adsense, Twitter followers, RSS followers or comment count? I used to keep checking stats that I know only update once a day. The only way your stats will increase is by you writing great content! Get your content done first, then obsess over your stats.
2. Blog Commenting: How many times have you read that blog commenting is one of the best forms of blog promotion? Hopefully loads, because it is! However, writing quality content is more important, you need to make sure that the people you send to your blog via comments actually have something useful to read when they get there.
3. Social Media: This is starting to eat into a lot of bloggers time. Checking your Twitter or Facebook feeds for new updates is addictive. Shut down any social media applications, most seem to pop up notifications that can easily distract you from the task at hand.
4. Emails: I must get around 150 emails a day to my many email accounts. If I sat and replied to them all, I would never have time to blog. I tend to scan through for any urgent emails, get them out the way and leave the rest until after I have written an awesome blog post.
5. Design Tweaks: I used to be a sucker for this one. “I think I will just add a new section to my sidebar to show off feed counts or a new header, it will only take a couple of minutes” – No it wont, once you start making one change you keep making other changes, this eats up a lot of time. My advice is to set out certain times for making blog changes and have a clear schedule for which jobs are most urgent.

The aim is to do all the above after you have written your killer blog post. You will find that you are able to write better when you are fresh and don’t have a clouded mind. It is really easy to get sucked into the above sins and before you know it an hour has passed and you have other commitments which prevent you from blogging.

You will actually find that you can write your blog posts faster if you do them when you are fresh so you will still have time to waste on the above afterwards.

The best advice I can give is to disconnect yourself from the Internet whilst you write your post, this will prevent you from performing any of the sins I have outlined in this post.

Are you a productive blogger? Are you a sucker for any of the 5 sins? What sin prevents you from being a productive blogger? Let me know below.

I am guessing you are having a bit of un-productive time right now, so follow me on Twitter and I can waste more of your time!!