Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Just bear with me while I muse out loud. It helps. If you have any ideas of your own, I’m all ears, too.

This RV is not set up for hours of typing. I use a laptop now, and the dinette seating is soft and unsupportive of my back. I will get tendonitis if I carry on geeking like I usually do, and I don’t want to be sitting at a computer all day in any case.

I’m therefore going to have to figure out how to be more efficient. While it certainly makes me happy that I now have a dry-erase whiteboard attached to the wall, that isn’t really the kind of thing I mean. I have heard that one can run blogs in about two or three hours a week with an hour a day for answering comments and schmoozing. The schmooze part is fun and vitally important because without schmooze the word won’t go out. And really, who wants to visit a blog when nobody replies? It’s rude and off-putting.

I haven’t yet figured out how to do it, but one thing I’m going to try is to set appointments to do certain things. For example, an hour a day without fail should keep me on top of the Markeroni backlog. I could dedicate an hour a day to schmooze and forums.

I’m learning that it’s possible to write well even when I’m tired or don’t feel in the mood, so maybe I could allocate one day to each of my blogs and put together posts in advance. Because I’m doing paid posting and each one must be interspersed with something non-paid, I can’t just advance-post everything. But I can advance-write a week of posts, somewhere between five and ten articles, and in fact that’s what I was doing before the move made me insane.

With Raven’s RV it’s more organic because I’m blogging about my life as an RVer, whereas here I’m blogging about things that interest me and the format is more like articles/an e-zine. Raven’s Rides will be more e-zine style. I can see Raven’s RV developing into more of an e-zine as time goes by, or more of a combination: some life, some articles.

Weekends would be cross-pollination times with newsletters going out and “this week on Raven’s Roads” type posts.

I would like to start a sideline in writing promotional copy for others. It’s fun work, well paid, and would mean I could stop doing most of my paid posts. There has to be time for housework, doing fun stuff, and improving my websites.

Efficiency is an ugly word. It makes me seem like a control freak, at least to my mind. But I know that if I don’t figure this out I’m going to be facing the undesirable: burnout, or never updating my blogs, or feeling overwhelmed because I’m updating everything at once, or never have any time to do anything else. I’m going to have to get my timer out, I think, and see how long this really takes.

Perhaps it’s time I started rising at seven again. I can get a lot done in those quiet, early hours.

Possible schedule:

Monday: Markeroni; write Raven’s Roads posts, schmooze RR
Tuesday: Markeroni; schmooze Raven’s RV
Wednesday: Markeroni; write and/or cross-post Raven’s Rides posts, schmooze RR
Thursday: Markeroni; TT schmooze; do any Markeroni blog writing or editing required
Friday: whatever’s left over
Weekend: cross-pollination of sites and linky love

Paid posts: do when I’m already online and when something worth doing comes up

Possibilities: solicit on-topic paid posts via PPP Direct (bearing in mind that the new Argus thing is coming up Real Soon Now).

And now, if you don’t mind, I have some cats to pet and dinner to cook. ;)

Here are some other posts

• Thursday Thirteen #21: 13 emotions that we’re better off without
• Thursday Thirteen #22: Better decluttering through Thursday Thirteen
• Thursday Thirteen #7: 13 Things I’d barely thought about two weeks ago
• Thursday Thirteen #23: 13 Things about the winter solstice
• Thursday Thirteen #19–13 ways to cheat outrageously at NaNoWriMo

Comments