My content plan for 2019.
It is now three and half months since I last wrote a blog post.
In spite of my undoubted time management skills and all I have learned about being a freelancer, it seems I still have a long way to go.
Essentially, I took on a lot of work. And tried to have a holiday – and then was still doing the work that I took on in 2018.
I have been doing ten, eleven hour days and ditching everything that seems non-essential – including my commitment to write something every week.
None of this is complaining, dear reader: I am glad of the work, and glad to be busy -but work-life balance has been out of whack.
There is now a little gap before the next round of proofing comes along (the biggest bit of work I am doing is project managing and proofreading a book for a local publisher – that double whammy is something I won’t be doing again) and so I sat down to see if I could write something, anything to get things going again.
My blog is not the most widely read of productions, and I don’t imagine people have been sitting around wondering what happened to me – rather, the weekly discipline of sitting down to write, and the accompanying reflection and research, are what I have been missing.
The other thing I have been putting off is a content plan for the year – and that’s another reason I haven’t been writing regularly.
I teach a workshop on writing engaging content for the web at a local high school, and one of the things I talk about is the importance of a content plan. The idea is to sit down and make a spreadsheet with the weeks (or months – whatever your schedule is) of the year and try to fill each week with an idea for something to write. These can be tied to external events (on National Cat Day, write something about cats for instance) or they can be internally generated (one of my areas of focus is editing, so I will devote the month of May to posts about editing, for instance). Or a mix of both.
However it is created, a content plan is a godsend for that day when you have no ideas and no momentum and no time to think: you just sit down and start doing what the list says.
So – a content plan, and a post for next week. I had best get on with it.
Main Picture: Andrew Neel, Unsplash