Batching Blog Posts for Productivity

Last week, I had a lot to do. 6 posts for my small dog blog niche site to play catch up from my time in the hospital. Then I had to start a new blog, redoing everything from the first phase of Affiliate Bootcamp for my RVing Affiliate blog. Keep in mind that I also write fiction for fun (or profit) and shorter blog posts for others for pay too. It seemed pretty difficult so I tried to figure out the best way to use my time productively.

I like Holly Lisle's writing classes for fiction. The first one I took a few years back was a free email class. It was called, "How to write flash fiction that doesn't suck," or something like that. Anyway, the class was aimed at writing 5-10 flash fiction stories around a similar topic and genre. Blog posts on the same niche blog are going to be kinda similar in both topic and tone.

Some people identify flash fiction as less than 500 words. Others say less than a 1000 words. It's complete stories that are essentially, blog post length. To me, blog posts are like short, non-fiction stories. There's the introduction, the middle that resolves conflicts in fiction or solves problems in non-fiction, and the conclusion, which might have a call to action in a blog post.

That flash fiction class, because it was aimed at writing multiple stories around a similar topic didn't teach writing each story individually in a linear way. Instead, we identified 10 conflicts to cover all of the stories we planned to write. Then we wrote all of the introductions. Then all of the endings, each within the correct number of words. Then the middles got done. Essentially, we broke the stories into batches.

Batching for productivity is a common concept. Basically, you group similar tasks that require similar things together. This streamlines completion. I do this with other types of tasks and you probably do too. You may do all of the outdoor chores at the same time or group shopping trips to be multiple stores before coming home. Maybe you do all of you social media stuff at the same time so you don't check on multiple sites multiple times a day. It saves time.

I hadn't thought of applying it to blog posts until I had so many to do in the same week. This is how I did the 6 small dog posts.

1. Jaaxy - keywords for 6 different posts - Sunday last week
2. 6 Titles - Sunday last week
3. 6 Outlines - Monday
4. 3 intro-conclusions - Thursday AM
5. Filled in those three middles - Thursday PM
6. 3 intro & conclusions - Friday
7. Filled in those 3 middles - Saturday
8. Edited and posted all posts - Today

Result: 6 posts written, edited, and posted in 8 days.

This isn't a good strategy if you usually write posts the day you post them. I was using it to fill in posts that I should have done in previous weeks. I wrote 6 posts for a blog where I usually post twice a week.

Doing it was a revelation though. I track the time working on my blog and break it down by tasks. Social media engagement is separate from the writing. Writing and editing 6 posts should theoretically take 3 times the amount of time it takes me to write and edit two posts, right? Wrong. By batching them, I did 6 posts in the time it usually takes me to do 4.

For the affiliate bootcamp blog, I batched all of the blog start & housekeeping tasks for Sunday. Then wrote the about me. Then edited the other two posts and got all of them up.

I'm going to try to batch posts for the small dog blog again this week, with the goal being to have extra posts for the next time I land in the hospital or have a med change that makes me feel weird. That's not a question of if. It's a when. And it will be okay. I could have done the social media stuff some of the days and even maybe posted pre-written posts but I wasn't focused enough to write.

Have you ever tried batching blog tasks or post writing?

What things do you group together?

Do you find that it speeds things up for you or does it slow you down to jump between posts?