5 TIPS TO MASTER ORGANISATION

Christmas time is all about ‘holly jolly’ fun, and with the celebrations & socialising with loved ones comes a bit of a busy old diary. The run up to Christmas is one of my favourite times of year, but one things for sure, it’s the most tiring too! Evenings spent with friends enjoying the festive fun, days spent working or shopping for all your presents & generally just a back to back schedule! Whilst it’s all fun & games it does make dedicating a little time to blogging slightly more tricky than when you’re in your typical working week routine, and so it’s ever more important to be a queen of organisation.

We all know the benefits of being an organised little bee, the main perk of course is that your blog content keeps seamlessly flowing, yet you are not spending every hour slaving away trying to get features live. A little pre planning & mastering the skills of organisation means you can still enjoy the festive frolicking, and your blog readers still get the jolly content they look forward to!

So … guess what todays how to feature is all about? Organisation, you got it!

I did a humongous post about organisation & upping productivity right when I started this series, but thought today I’d look to do the ‘ultimate guide’ to being organised. My top 5 tips for mastering organisation.

Firstly of course is the most simple tip of all (it’s always the easy ones which can be easily forgotten), and that’s just to get yourself a little note pad, or find somewhere to capture your ideas, plans, to do lists etc which you can easily access & call upon at any time. I talk about having a note pad in most my how to features, but it genuinely is one of the most helpful things to carry around & in the long run helps keep my organisation in check! Knowing clearly what I need to do, capturing my ideas & planning my features in one place is key for keeping my daily blogging in check!

 The key reason having a note pad or diary helps, is that it enables you to start planning ahead. For me, pre planning is my ultimate saviour and the secret to successful daily blogging. Without pre-preparation i’d find myself in a cuffuffle every day, having no time to write, posts going live at erratic times & generally poor quality images and content. Having a clear idea of what I want to write, when I want my features to go live and what I need to do helps ensure I keep on top of things and always have content prepared to go live each day!I can’t rave anymore about making your own daily or weekly to do list & creating a list of the future content you want to work on!

 Pre planning is easier said than done though, it’s all well and good to talk about pre-planning but it’s actually in the ‘doing’ you’ll see the biggest affect. Start with your note pad for ideas & to-do lists, but layer this with a dairy, or a calendar or some kind of planner to actually start scheduling & putting some real timings in place for your features & content production.

Having something like a diary or editorial calendar which allows you to look at your day, week, month will be the biggest thing to help your time management! If there’s one secret to being organised & mastering pre-planning it’s tackling the old time management obstacle. Having a little diary to ensure you know what needs to be done by when, what posts are planned to go live on what day & also to help you block out time to actually produce content will be a tiny little saviour in your blogging routine.Make sure you’re realistic when you’re working up your content calendar, and be sure to block out enough time for you to develop the content without feeling stressed or rushed. If you have a spare hour then block it out, making it official and having a clear idea of what you need to get done (see point above), make a list of your key actions or ‘to-dos’ will really help keep your productivity in check!Oh, and don’t just think you need to be at home at a desk to get stuff done, if you’ve got a laptop maximise ‘wasted’ time like on train journeys, at the airport, waiting to go out for dinner etc. There’s plenty of time in a day to get things done, it’s just about maximising the opportunities (an iPad is also a great way of starting to write up content whilst your on the go or away from home)!

Whist it’s great to block out time to sit & actually crack out the goods, it’s also worthwhile trying to be as agile as you can with blogging, particularly when it comes to emails & social media. Ignoring your emails or social pages because you’re busy will only create you more stress and hassle in the long run, as once you do finally sit down to write some blog features, you’ll find yourself drowning in tons of emails, comments and requests.It’s not always easy (or ideal) to be ‘always on’ when it comes to emails & social media and there are definitely times when emails should be put away for a while (dinner dates, movies, nights with friends, meetings, work etc) but I personally always try and check my emails & respond to emails as soon as I possibly can. I have my blog emails loaded onto my phone, so I can keep on top of anything urgent & respond to any easy emails immediately.

The holy grail. Theres not much to say on this, in my opinion its a no brainer, scheduling is the absolute fairy godmother of daily blogging. It’s not every day you will have 4 hours to sit and write a post, to shoot your pics & get everything live (especially if you work full time like me), but there might be days or weeks when you have more time than others, so with your note pad full of ideas, your editorial calendar or diary jam packed with planned content features, and some time blocked out to sit and write, do as much as you feasibly can, prepare as many posts as possible when you have the time, and start scheduling the features for live over the coming days and weeks. The more you can pre plan, the more you can spend time enjoying creating ideas & content for future posts without having to worry about the day in hand!And there you have it, my personal tips and tricks for keeping organised at all times, they’re not difficult & they’re not new news, but if you can really try and master organisation then the whole blogging thing becomes a lot more fun and stress free.

Have you got any tips for keeping organised?