How to Blog and Work Full Time

Fashion and Style Police

 

If you think balancing blogging and your full-time job is impossible, then you’re wrong. You can do both at the same time successfully. I worked and blogged at the same time when I first set up Fashion and Style Police. I had a customer service job in Manchester which I hated. I had to commute for over 4 hours to and fro work, on the slowest, most unreliable train service ever. So trust me when I say my job experience was not pleasant. Apart from the commuting, I hated the job itself. It was an office job and all, but it was not for me at all. It was killing my creative mind slowly so blogging became an outlet for me. But I won’t deny the fact that it was a lot of work, running a blog and having a full-time job.  I had to plan and organise every aspect of the blog to get things going.
From my experience, if you love writing, have a good plan and the right mindset, you can achieve this easily. In the beginning it may be a bit tricky but you will adjust to it in no time. The trick is to use every minute you have efficiently and stay focused. You can blog and work full-time by:

Assessing your daily activities
Observe your daily routine. Write it out in a journal if you have to, so you have a clear perspective of all your daily activities. Next to each activity write down an estimate of how much time you spend on it.  It doesn’t have to be exact; a rough estimate will do.
You’ll be able to see how much time goes for non-productive tasks like watching TV, chatting on Whatsapp, or going on social media.  You can use that time for writing your blog posts, editing pictures, scheduling tweets, sharing your content on social media, or whatever you need to do for your blog.
You can also use time spent commuting to reply your blog comments, read and comment on other blogs, send emails and connect with your readers.
Being creative with time
If you want to balance blogging with your full-time job, you don’t only need to make use of already existing free time but you also have to create time. Waking up an hour early gives you a head start for the day. Use that extra hour to work on your blog. If you are focused, that one hour is enough to do a good amount of work on your blog because you likely won’t have any distraction. In addition to that, make use of your lunch time. Let’s be honest: no one uses one hour to eat lunch. Share your lunch time with your blogging activities.

Planning your blog posts
If you have your blog post ideas ready, it saves you time spent thinking of them. Have a notebook or a handy app to take note of post ideas, especially those that crop up at weird times. Writing an outline for those ideas even if it’s a sketchy one helps. Have an editorial calendar where you write down which blog post you should work on. The idea behind this is that as soon as you have free time, you can start work immediately.

Scheduling blog and social media posts
Automation is your best friend. Automating your posts allows you to have your content up automatically. Scheduling your tweets in advance helps get your tweets out when you want them. Make it a habit to create content in advance and schedule them. This will help you save and utilize your time effectively.

Do you blog and work full-time? How do you balance them both?

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