How To Banish Blogger Angst Forever
I haven’t posted here since April 12. That’s almost a full month. If I were my own client I would advise posting “at least every other week, minimum, and once a week would be much better.” But, if you suffer from blogger angst, you know that it’s a vicious cycle – the longer between posts, the more you worry about NOT posting and the harder it becomes to sit down and write something. Well, it’s easy to write something, but it’s hard to write
Don't worry. It'll be okay.
something you think is worth publishing.
Then, you check your calendar and it’s been a month! Yikes! The pressure is on! You must publish a post!
I’m a believer in the benefits of procrastination. Sometimes we really do just need to slow down and give our mental processes time to do their thing. However, it can go too far. Like when you wait a month between posting on your blog.
Since I am pretty much an expert at identifying when I have crossed the line between “taking a mental break” and “becoming a total slacker” I feel comfortable offering some tips:
Take advantage of the times your mind is fertile. There are days when I think of about 15 blog post topics. If I can capture a few notes about each one, I have a start on some posts. Better yet, if I can sit still and write them out fully, I’ll have stockpile. Days like that can’t be scheduled in, but there are some things you can do to increase the likelihood of them occurring.
Boost your creativity. The easiest way to do this is to give yourself little challenges. No matter what you are doing, try to think of some way that it could connect to the theme of your blog. How is a road trip like what you write about? Are your kids’ activities in any way like what you write about? Is there a current trend in your city that you can relate to what you write about? The more you stretch to make these connections, the easier finding them will become. Of course, you won’t always end up with a post you can use doing these kinds of mental challenges, but sometimes you will.
Write at least a little, even when you don’t want to. This is just another way to say “keep showing up.” You don’t have to publish what you write, but you really should write on the days you think you are supposed to be writing. You can’t write just whatever for this one to work. Writing just a sentence or two of a post or editing an old post or making some notes for a future post is fine, but journaling about something totally unrelated to your blog will not help you overcome blogger angst.
Publish it anyway. Don’t let excuses stop you. It doesn’t matter if you can’t find a suitable photo to illustrate what you’ve written, or if you aren’t quite satisfied with it. Sometimes, you have to just let it go and publish it anyway to avoid being stuck forever. If most of your posts have all of the elements that are important to you, that’s what’s important. You may even find that a not-quite-finished thought resonates with your readers, or that a good photo is extraneous to what you are doing.
How do you overcome blogger angst? What makes it worse? Please share, because, to be honest, I’m still feeling a little angst-ey.
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I love your tip, publish it anyway. I have at least 4 blogs at any given time that NEED to see the light of day but, they sit unpublished. I even have one for the company blog that sits unpublished. As always, great tips!
Maybe you should set a date for those posts to auto-publish? I’m not sure I could do that…but it might be worth a shot! Glad you liked the tips, now go PUBLISH
All excellent tips, Dava, as always. I think another helpful way to procrastinate without actually procrastinating is to have a preview conversation with your audience. Well, with one member of your potential audience. Call up a friend or go to lunch and just say, I’d like to write about X. Chances are good that even if you’ve been stymied as to an angle to take, your friend will have heard something about X and will be able to offer up some background — an article she’s read, a concern she has, a problem or solution she can contribute.
Or, if your friend has no background on the topic, perhaps he’ll be able to pepper you with questions. The ones you can answer right away go into the post. The ones you CAN’T answer right away? That’s the best part. You can do research or you can post a philosophical discussion about both sides of the issue, or you can ask your readers what they think. Win-win!
Thanks for offering up so many perspectives on this idea. We tend to think of blogger angst popping up when we can’t think of something to say, but as you point out, sometimes it’s so important to us that we say it well that no matter what we have to say, we’re not comfortable with how we’ve said it. That says more about our strive for perfection and our own egos. As a professional organizer and a perfectionist writer, I’m trying to hew more closely to two related mottos: “Done is better than perfect!” and “Progress — not perfection!”
I love the idea of chatting with a friend about ideas. That is a really good one, thanks for sharing it. Now, are you free for lunch next week? Kidding, kidding. Sort of.