To Schedule or Not To Schedule

I read four different articles about utilizing a posting schedule. The first was from ProBlogger, biased towards maintaining a schedule. As of late, I can sympathize with his sentiments:

Sporadic Posting Frequency – some days when I sat down to write – nothing came. On these days I would quite often not post anything.

Post Quality Varied – on days when I was on fire I could pump out a great quality post – while on other days when I was struggling I would often feel the pressure to post something – so would end up posting rubbishy posts.

Productivity Decreased – posting this way meant that I was spending more time blogging for less results. It took me away from other activities that I wanted to spend time on.

Let’s see: sporadic posting frequency — check; post quality variation — check; decreased productivity — check! In fact, some times the effort to create worthwhile content has been so incredibly unappealing that I avoid it in general because I don’t want it detracting from my productivity outside of this blog. What’s his recommendation?

I start by brainstorming topics (generally on a text file which sits on my desktop)

With a list of topics I’ll then pick one to develop a little further (I open up a new text document for each post and save them to a ‘posts in progress’ folder on my desktop)

I start by tweaking the topic into a post title (this sometimes change later as I actually write).

Next I jot down a sentence that describes the post that I want to write – so that later when I come to write it I know what I meant by the title. This sentence often gets used as the first sentence of the actual post.

I then will quickly brainstorm a few of the main points that I want to make in the post. I don’t take a lot of time on this as I find that most of the main points will come during the writing process – however if I have a few obvious points already in mind I capture them now

I then quickly think back to previous posts that I might have written on similar topics. This is useful because it helps to develop your post but also is useful for interlinking posts

Then I select another of the posts developed in step #1 and then go through steps #2 – 6 again with each one in turn.

Once I’ve got enough post ideas developed for the week ahead I’ll then think about what order I want to post them in and map out a posting schedule for the week ahead.

I like the idea of brainstorming. It’s common practice in schools. It’s familiar. It’s comforting. It’s so five-paragraph-essay-esque. He also offers a list from his particular self-imposed 31 day challenge, which seemingly offers very useful information — and I, for one, intend to review it for my own personal benefit. I’m almost positive I could benefit from at least a few ideas he’s covered.

The next article I read was from Zen Tricks with a 7 day (8 if you count day 0) method to scheduling. Here’s the recommendation:

The schedule I’m suggesting below is for 3 posts per week. If you want to do more, try combining every 2 days of activities into 1 day.

First you have to decide on a target. 1 post per day or one per week? Something in between? Its up to you, but you need a goal to aim for.

Now lets plan ahead. Get a good start by listing 3 or 4 weeks of ideas. Just rough post titles is enough for now. You may not end up using some of these ideas, but we just need to make sure that you have plenty of material to work with.

Again, we have the brainstorming theme, albeit not explicitly named. They recommend coming up with an ideal number of posts per week, which is an additional helpful idea. I don’t necessarily know if I’d like to commit myself to a post every day, a post every week day, a post every other day, only posting on weekends… Obviously, you see where I’m going with that. Still, the idea of making a little notepad more readily accessible is becoming more and more appealing — and I should be doing this in the first place.

Then we have The Pursuit of Mommyness with many helpful hints in regards of the why’s, when’s, how’s, and delivery of scheduled posts. Obviously, I want to maintain my following — repeat readers are key to garnering an audience. She recommends marketing via social networks, and I found my way to Twitterfeed as a result of wanting to make the process more stream-lined. Okay, so more of the information I thought she gave me actually came from another article she linked to from The Secret is in the Sauce. They recommend posting between 10am and 2pm in order to achieve the maximum audience. (In fact, by the time you read this, I will be sitting in a training session that I think should go towards my Pro3 Certification.)

Now, we’ve focused heavily on the pro-scheduling side. Could there be downfalls to scheduling? Create Market Profit seems to think so.

Having a blog posting schedule pretty much forces you to write at certain times on certain days. In most cases, being forced to write like this eventually leads to some really [bad] content.

Content that has been created because it was time to create it, not because it had real value.

Content that was written because of what day it is, and not because you had a great idea for a post.

Content that is a lot more for your schedule, and a lot less for your readers.

This is bad, and when this starts happening, it will quickly turn your blog into complete and utter crap. And as you can imagine, it’s pretty tough to make your blog a success when it’s mostly comprised of crap.

I get that. Seriously, I’ve got some pretty lackluster content from when I was posting every single day. Granted, I didn’t have a completely set schedule, and I could have deviated from the series posts if the mood suited me. But a simple list of 5 sentences does not make for good public reading — personal journaling, yes; public posting, no. Of course, I still got commenters noticing how I found so many things to be grateful for, but that should only get me so far before I need to start putting forth meaningful content. How am I to harbor best-selling author ambitions if I barely ever string together more than a few sentences? I can’t, and since I like to dream big, I need to work appropriately in order to even come halfway to that goal.

However, I’m going to err on the side of scheduling. As a writer, it’s my job to write every single day. It’s my job to brainstorm. It’s my job to put my creativity to work. Surely I’ll have breaks here and there, but you can’t just say, “I don’t feel like working today — I’ll just hang out on FaceBook all day and play solitaire!” I’m sorry, that’s just not how the world works. There are deadlines, and you have to learn to meet deadlines for almost every single job category out there. So, it’s better to go forth and schedule some brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing, revising, and publishing sessions instead of waiting for some stroke of genius to strike.