FeaturingDarren Rowse Amy Porterfield Brian Clark Abby Larson Matt Kepnes Heather Armstrong Jeff Goins Gretchen Rubin Leo Babauta

BLOGWISE

How to do more with less

Blog Wise How to do more with less

Publication date February 2012

Published by: Darren Rowse www.problogger.net

Written by: Georgina Laidlaw twitter.com/georginalaidlaw

Producer: Jasmin Tragas www.wonderwebby.com

Graphic Design: Naomi Creek naomi@naomicreek.com

Version 1.0 ©Copyright 2012 Darren Rowse

NOTICE OF RIGHTS All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NOTICE OF LIABILITY The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.

Neither the authors and ProBlogger, nor its dealers or distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.

Contentsintroduction _________________________________________________ 4

Darren Rowse: Values, goals, and priorities __________________ 5

Amy Porterfield: Planning for less stress ____________________ 9

Brian Clark: Trusting the vision _____________________________12

Abby larson: Clear divisions of labor ________________________15

Matt Kepnes: leveraging limitations ________________________18

Heather Armstrong: getting the job done ___________________21

Jeff goins: Productivity by deception ________________________24

gretchen Rubin: Happily productive _________________________27

leo Babauta: stripping it back ______________________________30

Radically improve your productivity in 9 steps _______________33

Further reading ____________________________________________37

IntroductionWhen i came up with the idea for this ebook, i admit i was secretly hoping to learn a few things about blogging productivity myself!

i’m not the most productive blogger, i have to admit. in fact, i can be pretty scattered and even a little haphazard at times. There’s always something on my list that i’m trying to get to, but never seem to do.

i know i’m not alone: many of you will have felt a similar sense of frustration.

After all, blogging is a complex job, with a lot of moving parts. in any one day we can be writing, doing a webinar or interview, chatting with readers and other bloggers, working on increasing subscription or sales conversions, negotiating advertising deals—and that’s without considering any of the tasks that daily life throws our way.

like most bloggers, i started blogging while i still had a day job, and now i have a family. so i know how challenging it can be to find the time to get everything done—it’s something i still struggle with even as a full-time blogger.

in these pages, you’ll find interviews with myself and eight of the web’s most productive bloggers, which were completed by my editor, georgina laidlaw, in late 2011. some of these people are industry stalwarts; some are newer arrivals to the blogosphere. some use their blogs as launching pads for other on- and offline ventures; others run their businesses entirely through their blogs.

i can tell you right now: there’s no secret formula to blogging productivity! each of us has our own personal style and approach to work. We’re all juggling unique sets of challenges, obligations, motivations, and desires.

This ebook provides a rare opportunity to get inside the heads of some of the blogosphere’s leading lights. i guarantee that in these interviews, you’ll find some fresh ideas that can work for you.

i’ve already picked up quite a few suggestions that i’m adapting to my own blogging work, and i hope you’ll do the same. When you do, i’d love to hear how the advice in this ebook helps boost your blogging productivity.

let me know!

Darren Rowse

Darren RowseValues, goals, and priorities

Profile• Runs

– problogger.net– digital-photography-school.com

• Blogging since 2002.

• Works with a team of five.

Philosophy“For me, productivity comes down to knowing what your goals and values and priorities are, and ordering your life around them.”

With four blogs on the go, a team of five to manage, and a growing family with three children aged five and under, Darren Rowse is one busy blogger.

“I think I’m at my worst when there’s nothing to do,” he laughs, “and I’m at my best when there are things to do. So I guess I just tend to fill life up!”

it was this philosophy that got him into blogging in the first place. Back in 2002, Darren was studying and working “two or three” part-time jobs. He didn’t have a whole lot of time to spare. But blogging intrigued him, so he managed to fit it in as well.

“For the first year or so really I was blogging at night, I was blogging in lunch breaks, I was blogging on sick days or on the weekends—it was really just fitting in,“ he explains. “I think I found blogging enjoyable—particularly in the early days, almost addictive.”

And now that his hobby has become his business?

“For me, [productivity] comes down to knowing what your goals and values and priorities are, and ordering your life around them, and trying to be disciplined around it.”

“The next 12 months of my life”

While fun may have been the main motivator when Darren started out, now a range of factors help keep his daily blogging tasks on track.

“Fear is a big one—fear of ‘if I don’t put this blog post out, what are people going to think of me?’ or ‘am I going to look stupid, am I going to let people down, am I going to be fulfilling my commitments?’ So fear’s probably one of the motivating factors.

“Nagging—that works!” he laughs. “Whether that be my kids or my wife, or the people who work for me, or that little voice inside my head, or my readers. But really,” he says, “it comes down to priorities.”

To keep motivated, Darren has six-monthly planning sessions, to do “some bigger picture thinking, and try to work out where my business is heading”.

These reviews let him consider what he needs to do each month to achieve his priorities, and help him manage his time and other resources to get the work done.

“I think one of the big things that’s helped me over the last 12 or so months,” Darren reveals, “is bringing a number of people onto the team who are perhaps a little bit more task-orientated.

5Darren Rowse

“Mindmapping’s probably one of the main

tools i use,” Darren says.

When he’s stuck for ideas, he says,

“i go back to the last place that i think

i had a good one, and then i’ll mindmap

from there … i try and go back to a place

where sparks were flying, and recapture

some of the sparks that i didn’t follow up

on, and build from there.”

Favorite productivity technique

“Jasmin, who helps me create products—ebooks and courses and things—she’s got this wonderful spreadsheet of the next 12 months of my life, and what products we need to launch and what needs to be done to get those products to launch.

“Now that’s something I never would have done previously,” he admits. “But it’s certainly helped me.”

Filtering ideas in a distracting industry

Working from home has its distractions—especially with a newborn son in the mix —but Darren sees a range of distractions within his business, too.

social media is, of course, one. so are “the toys that you can justify buying to ‘help you run your blog’. There’s just so many distractions on those levels.”

But even ideas can be distracting. Darren’s business generates income through four completely different online properties. And people within those fields email him daily with business ideas of their own.

“It’s about filtering,” Darren says. “What’s a good idea? What should we do? What’s an important idea, and what’s just fun?”

How does he tell what’s important? There are two criteria.

The first is his goals. “On one level I guess I’m trying daily, even two or three times a day, to analyse critically, ‘What am I doing right now and is it worthwhile? Is this three hours I just spent on Twitter taking me closer to my goals—and it could—or is it taking them away?’ ”

This kind of questioning has become an automatic part of Darren’s daily work rhythm. By paying conscious attention to it, he’s ensured it’s become second nature. While that doesn’t always stop him from becoming distracted, it does help him stay focused.

The second criterion is slightly more nebulous.

“I can’t sustain something that’s not giving me energy”

He’s a little embarrassed to admit it—listen to the audio from this interview, and you can almost hear him blushing over skype—but Darren finds that his work gives him energy.

“That sounds a little ‘new age’,” he says,“but if something is giving me energy, I’ll do it more. If something’s taking energy I question, ‘Is this worthwhile?’

“I really want to build something that’s sustainable,” he adds, “and I can’t sustain something that’s not giving me energy.”

This unique perspective was part of Darren’s motivation for bringing on team members to help him build his business. Though, he points out, “the reality is that I didn’t have the resources to delegate or hire someone for quite a few years.”

His solution in those days was to batch tasks together. He still does this today for administrative and other dull, must-do jobs, rewarding himself afterward with a relaxing walk, or some time with his kids.

But Darren’s focus on energy levels also helps him make decisions about his blogs, and his task list, on a daily basis.

“I [also] tend to watch what’s giving other people energy … my readers particularly. If I’m doing certain things and people are responding well to them, then that’s a signal that I need to do that more.

“And conversely, if I’m doing something and there’s no reaction or a negative reaction, then I’m questioning, ‘Is this something that I want to put time and energy into?’”

6Darren Rowse

To make the most of his own energy, Darren has been conscious about noting his daily working rhythm. “My golden hours are in the morning,” he says, noting that that’s the time when he does most of his creative work, usually in a nearby café.

He reserves the afternoons for tasks that require less creative energy, and more brute force. evenings are spontaneous—a time when he can pick and choose what he does, depending on how he feels and what’s on the go.

A simple, flexible toolset

it’s one thing to have positive energy and a 12-month plan. But how does Darren harness that energy, and put it to work on a daily, or even hourly basis? You might expect that his secret lies in a productivity philosophy or app … but you’d be mistaken.

“I’m addicted to buying and downloading productivity apps for my iPhone,” Darren admits, “and I use none of them, at all.I’m hopeless!”

That said, he’s definitely a digital tools kind of guy—in meetings, Darren relies almost entirely on electronic media rather than paper or printouts. so the services he does use are mainly digitally based.

“I like the idea of getting-things-done systems and apps and things, but I tend to use iCal, which comes with my Mac, and it’s just a calendar.”

“Also,” he says, “I use a lot of text documents—I have about ten open on my computer at the moment. They’re just plain text documents … that’s where I put my to-do lists and half-written posts and that kind of thing.”

There is, however, one productivity tool in which Darren’s personal time- and task-management approach combines with those of his team: Basecamp.

“We use that as a team to manage projects,” Darren says. “So every ebook has its own folder in Basecamp, and I can tap into that and get pretty much any document I want along the way.”

As a central source of project information, it’s in Basecamp that the ProBlogger 12-month plan is distributed into task lists, and manifested in outputs like product prototypes and sales page drafts.

Darren also communicates with his team using gmail, chat, and skype, depending on what’s required. Periodic face-to-face meetings with individuals, and his team as a whole, also help keep things on track.

“All my team members work part-time,” Darren explains. “So we need to keep things simple. That said, we also need to make sure that the right people are involved in the right discussions, and have access to the people and information they need.

“Making that happen can be a challenge,” he adds, “but the simpler the toolset, the easier it seems to be.”

“It takes a lot of work to be flexible”

Despite his active imagination, Darren still gets stuck for ideas. Along with mind-mapping, which he describes as a way to “go back to a place where sparks were flying, and recapture some of the sparks that I didn’t follow up on”, his other main method of getting the creative juices flowing is to take a break.

enter: three young sons, a wife, and an abiding passion for photography. “When I’m struggling I’ll try and break it and do something that’s completely different,” Darren explains. “Go for a walk, or go for a kick of the football with my kids—just completely break it.”

Darren really values the opportunities blogging allows him to be more flexible with his time. “In fact,” he says, “that’s one of the reasons I got into blogging as a business.”

The week before our interview, he’d taken a few hours out of his afternoon to do “fruit duty” at his son’s kindergarten. And earlier in the year, he and his wife had taken a tropical holiday.

The perfect life? Not exactly, says Darren.

“The reality is that it takes a lot of work to be flexible sometimes. To take a week off and go away means working doubly hard the week before, to get things ready, and working harder the week after as well.”

7Darren Rowse

When he reels off his weekly work schedule, we begin to get an inkling of what that really means.

Darren says he works from around 8.30 each morning to 5 in the evening. suspicious? When pressed, he admits, “Well, on weekdays then I would work again from say 7.30 until 10.30, 11.

“And on weekends, I work Sunday nights once the kids are in bed, but I don’t work on the weekend other than occasionally checking emails to see if there’s anything too urgent.”

He says he doesn’t know what all those hours add up to. our calculations suggest he’s averaging at least 68 hours work a week. “It’s fun,” he grins. “I enjoy it.”

Priorities, priorities

With a blogging schedule that’s so intense, how does he fit in family time?

“For me it really comes down to, again, priorities: knowing what you want to achieve, and having boundaries around those types of things,” he explains.

“Having a strong family, and spending time with my family, doing some of those extra things that I might not have had time to do in a nine-to-five job—that’s a priority for me and so I need to really put space aside for that.

“On the other side, I guess having a business is a very high priority for me as well.”

Darren’s techniques for managing those often-conflicting demands?

“I’ll sit down quite often with my wife and say, ‘What’s the week look like? Kinder duty’s coming up, when is that?’ and I’ll diarise it.”

Darren’s family also has a clear-cut routine that shares the load and ensures everything that has to happen does. Darren also has a separate workspace in his home. While his family’s never far away—and are often at his desk—this physical delineation helps him stay focused.

Finally, clear communication with his wife ensures that minute-to-minute changes are handled as smoothly as possible—and that there’s room for spontaneity and inevitable change.

it’s a formula that seems to be working.

“I’m actually a very undisciplined person,” Darren reveals. “I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for nine years, because I’ve never stuck at anything for more than a year at a time. I’ve had literally 30 jobs!

“I think it’s just because I feel like I’m doing something that’s helping people and that I’m enjoying. That then drives my productivity.”

8Darren Rowse

Secret weapons• For blogging, iCal and text documents.

• For teamwork, Basecamp

Pro blogging productivity tip“Do something significant,” Darren says.“If you’re doing something that is significant to you, then you’re going to have so much more energy and motivation to do it. And if it’s significant to other people, then they’ll give you energy as well.

“The other thing,” he advises, “is try and understand your personality type and your style and what traits you have. I think for me, that’s helped a lot.

“Knowing I’m a morning person … Knowing that I’m an introvert … I’m a slow-paced kind of thinker… I’ve just got to know myself and how I work best, and I think that’s a big part of being productive.”

Key points• Do something significant.

• Know your goals, and do what it takes to make them a priority.

• Periodically assess—daily, monthly, six-monthly—whether your actions align with those goals.

• Chunk any tasks you dislike, and reward yourself for getting them done.

• Understand your personality type and energy levels: know when you work best, and on what.

Amy PorterfieldPlanning for less stress

Profile• Social media strategist

– 9,000+ Facebook Likes

– 23,000+ Twitter followers

– 6,500+ Google+ followers

– 1,000+ YouTube channel subscribers.

• Blogs about her work at amyporterfield.com, where she alsooffers social media training courses.

• Contributing blogger at Social Media Examiner and the Huffington Post, among others.

• Author of Facebook MarketingAll in One for Dummies.

Philosophy“Too much stress truly hinders your creativity and your end result.”

To say that Amy Porterfield, one of the biggest names in social media consulting, is results-focused is an understatement: results are her key motivation.

“I get really excited to see how people respond to my content,” Amy says. “I get a lot of my excitement from hearing success stories or hearing how people are working on different projects, and how they might integrate my strategies.

“That’s one aspect that I really enjoy.”

indeed, the results that others can achieve using her advice underpin the success of Amy’s business. Yet the social media niche is comparatively new and her advice is innovative. How does she ensure that the strategies she provides to others actually help them achieve results?

“I experiment a lot,” Amy reveals. “So with my own Facebook page or YouTube channel or Twitter account, I might try some new engagement strategies, some new strategies to grow my followers, and when they work really well, I take that information and I turn it into a module of an online program.

“People then can see that this really and truly has worked, and this is how it’s worked.”

Making time to experiment

Many bloggers have at least two major tasks: writing or blogging, and running their businesses (which may be on- or off-blog). experimentation and practical research adds another challenge to the mix, but Amy makes this work with a combination of planning, discipline, and regimentation.

When we interviewed her, she’d just been planning her work for the year ahead so she could “hit the ground running” on January 3.

“What I’ve been doing is making sure that I have everything in place so that I know what I’m selling, and what I’m promoting, and what I’m creating every single month of 2012,” Amy explains. “Now I won’t stick to it perfectly, but at least I’ll have a good idea as to how I’ll be spending my time.”

she uses a physical calendar as well as google Calendars, and employs a detailed system of color-coding. “I actually have to have something visual to look at deadlines on a calendar,” Amy explains. “I’m a visual person.”

While she describes this approach as “old-school” she feels that, “Part of being successful, productive and efficient is knowing your own style and then trying not to fight it, but just getting really good at streamlining it. That works for me.”

9Amy Porterfield

so, with this colorful, hard-copy plan, Amy can automatically work out when she’s likely to have the headspace to experiment.

“I do believe that you need to slow down and eliminate some of that stress in your life in order to be creative and think about those different ideas that you can experiment with,” she says.

“I’ve just finished a product launch and it was two or three weeks of a lot of stress. There was very little creativity that went on during those last three weeks. I didn’t experiment really with anything on my Facebook page or my Twitter account. It was just pretty much trying to stay above water.

“Everyone’s going to have those times,” she adds. “That’s just business in general. But you’ve got to know that you have to step out of it, because I think we’re missing opportunities—at least, I know I’m missing opportunities—when I live in that stress every single day.”

“You’ve got to build buffers in between in order to keep your business moving forward,” she advises.

“Each hour of my work day”

Amy filters that big plan down to a daily task list using a few techniques.

“I tend to decide how I’m going to use each hour of my work day,” she says. “And I chunk it … to know, okay from nine to ten I’m doing this, from ten to noon, I’m doing this. So that way I know how I’m going to spend my day.”

she’s also devised ways to minimise distractions.

“Each day,” she says, “I make sure that I have a running list. If anything pops into my head I have a tablet next to me where I just write it down so that I can forget about it in that moment and stay focused.

“I have to be really regimented with myself,” Amy reveals, “because it’s very easy to think, ‘Oh, I forgot to check that email!’ So I’ll jump on email, and then I’ll see 20 emails I need to get to, and then I pretty much am lost in those emails.

“So I’ve tried to be disciplined.”

At the end of the day, she says, she can use the list to easily prioritize her work. “I look at that list, and I then decide where each of those different action items go. Can it wait? Is it urgent? Was it just an idea that I don’t need to get to right now?”

To note down creative ideas, she uses google Docs.

“I have a Google Doc and any time an idea pops into my head, because I spend all day online I just go over to my Google Doc, put a few lines in there—not just one or two words,” she adds, “’because if I go back to it I’ll never remember what the heck I was talking about. But I flesh it out a little bit, an idea I had, and then I just go back to work.”

she started doing this, she says, because “when it’s time to site down and write a blog post or create a program, I could not remember all these great ideas I had. Now all my ideas are in one simple place, and that’s really changed things up for me … I’m never at a loss for great ideas because I’ve been collecting them every single day.”

10Amy Porterfield

Amy’s favorite technique is to let

social media in!

“every day, there’s about 20 minutes

in my day that i just allow myself

to spend some time on Facebook,

check out things unrelated to work,

and just socialise,” she says. “That

way, i give myself permission, i get

in there, i do it, there’s no guilt

associated with it, there’s no hurry

to it, and then i go on with my work.”

Favorite productivity technique

The discipline to decrease stress

of course, the greatest distraction for a social media strategist has got to be social media itself.

“When I first started social media, I was really diligent,” says Amy. “I’d get on Facebook justto post or just to engage with my fans and then I’d make myself get off and I wouldn’t look at anything, and it was agony, ’cause I wanted to engage even more.”

But this approach created tension. “The more I fought it, the more it became stress in my life,” she reveals. And more stress, says Amy, means reduced productivity: she loses focus and makes more mistakes, for example. “I just know I don’t do my best work under stress.

“So what I do is, every day, there’s about 20 minutes in my day that I just allow myself to spend some time on Facebook, check out things unrelated to work, and just socialise.

“That way,” she explains, “I give myself permission, I get in there, I do it, there’s no guilt associated with it, there’s no hurry to it, and then I go on with my work.

“I can get caught into stress pretty easily, but if I can make it a discipline to focus on different areas where I can decrease stress, I actually think I’m more productive and my work is better.”

Amy doesn’t see stress as a permanent fixture of working life—she believes it’s a signal that something’s wrong.

“If you’re not meeting deadlines, if you’re not actually producing great work that’s getting great results, you have to look at that and think something is broken in your process here. And you have to find that missing link or that broken piece that’s not working, and make sure you tweak it to get things moving forward again.

“You truly do start feeling that stress when things are not moving forward as planned.”

11Amy Porterfield

Secret weapons• A tablet or notebook for keeping running

lists of ideas and to-do items.

• Physical wall calendar.

• Google Docs

• Google Calendars

Pro blogging productivity tip“Plan ahead,” Amy advises.“Know your goals ahead of time—maybe six-month goals. What do you truly want to accomplish?”

Amy suggests bloggers look for “three things in your business that, if you were able to meet those goals, it would make a difference—it would allow you to move forward.

“Know those ahead of time,” she says,“because then you’ll actually have a road map as to where you’re going.”

Key points• Continual stress is the enemy of productivity.

• Planning can reduce stress and give you the freedom to be flexible.

• Flexibility lets you step outside what you’re doing, to spot new opportunities, and shift priorities so you can meet your most cherished goals.

• Don’t be a slave to “cool” tools. Look at what works for you, and streamline the way you use it to improve your productivity.

• Experimentation is an essential part of creativity, productivity, and business.

Brian ClarkTrusting the vision

Profile• Founder of Copyblogger Media, including:

– Copyblogger.com,one of the world’s 50 most powerful blogs of 2008

– Studiopress.com WordPress design framework

– Scribe SEO software

– Premise WordPress landing pageoptimization software.

• Blogs about digital marketing and copywriting at the Copyblogger blog

• Has more than 155,000 subscribers.

Philosophy“To achieve a bigger vision … is the key to all productivity… Start with where you’re trying to go, and then figure out how to get there.”

“I’d just like to say first off that I am a mess in the traditional productivity sense,” Brian Clark declares.

“I mean, as a writer, and as a CEO, a lot of what I do would be viewed as staring out the window doing nothing, but it’s actually the most important thing that I do.”

Yet the Copyblogger empire is nothing if not productive. The merging of four teams in 2010 has since become “a well-oiled machine” thanks to Brian’s stewardship.

“I just feel blessed that I have this team,” he says. “It’s amazing to me, what we can do.”

Brian believes it’s his commitment to a vision that has seen it grow from a one-man blog into a multi-million dollar, team-run media empire. surprisingly, that vision wasn’t formalised until well after the blog became popular.

“Looking for challenges that I wasn’t sure I could accomplish”

When Brian started copyblogger.com in 2006, it was off the back of a life-changing event.

“Until then,” he says, “I did things because I knew I could.” But then, “I had kind of a life-threatening episode in 2005, and I said, ‘if I make it through this, I’m never going to do what I don’t want to do again.’”

From that point forward, says Brian, “I was looking for challenges that I wasn’t sure I could accomplish, but I was going to try anyway.

“When I started Copyblogger,” he explains,“I didn’t know what was going to happen, I just knew that if I built an audience, they would tell me where they needed me to take them, and to provide them, and how to serve them.”

He also knew his niche—copywriting and marketing—very well, having run his own successful real estate firm offline.

He’d already discovered “that if you publish content and sell something else, like a service —which I did with my legal services at the time I was an attorney, and then later in the real estate brokerage field—it worked incredibly well”.

While Brian didn’t know at that point what he was trying to build in terms of a sales proposition, he knew that his first step was to build an audience—in other words, a market.

Trusting the vision

Many bloggers, notes Brian, confuse busyness with productivity.

“A lot of what people get done in a day is not important,” he suggests. “It’s busy work, and you really have to learn how to say no, and how to ignore things that aren’t critical in order to get done what needs to be done.”

12Brian Clark

Brian values reflection as a

productive exercise.

“As a writer, and as a Ceo, a lot of what

i do would be viewed as staring out the

window doing nothing, but it’s actually the

most important thing that i do.”

To that end, he says, because he’s

always reflecting, “i‘m never not working,

you know? it could be at all times.”

Favorite productivity techniqueHow do you know what needs to get done? “Trust your vision,” Brian says. Yet his own “productivity levels” in those early days would surprise many bloggers.

“I only posted twice a week starting Copyblogger,” he reminds us. “I never did the daily thing until we had a whole host of authors.”

“But,” he advises, “if you know what you’re trying to achieve, it is so much easier to show up that twice a week, or once a week, or five times a week—whatever you think is right.”

over time, the blog developed, the audience flourished, and Brian’s deep audience engagement ensured that he got to know his readers extremely well. it was that understanding that enabled him to perceive productive opportunities to build a business.

“I started to figure out that if I’m frustrated with something and I want something that I can do myself, without asking any other person … then I would imagine other people want it, too.”

A different path

in 2007, the blogosphere was “shifting from blogging as idealism to blogging as a commercial venture,” Brian recalls. That year, Copyblogger “became really the first blog to sell something, and that was a membership program, which is still around today”.

Brian perceived the link between services and content, and that, he says, “was really the genesis of my whole content marketing philosophy”. But he was eager to dosomething different from what others were trying at the time.

Rather than take the idea in a traditional direction, the connections he’d made through Copyblogger, and his research into other markets (“I was a 37signals fanboy,” he admits), prompted him to partner with software producers.

“As time went on I realised that what I needed as a publisher and a marketer online was what [the audience] needed. So I had it built, but I did it through partnering with people who could do what I couldn’t. And so I did that pretty much once every year—a new partnership, which formed a new company.”

By 2010 he had four separate companies as well as Copyblogger.

“We had grown to the point where I had all these smart people that were partners, and they were in separate companies and they weren’t allowed to talk to each other, if you will, because there was no profit motivation.”

How did Brian know that something had to change?

“At the time,” he says, “you had this focal point, which was Copyblogger and me, and yet there were these separate satellites, and they didn’t share together in knowledge or expertise or teamwork or profits.”

“To achieve a bigger vision … you have to start with where you’re trying to go, and then figure out how to get there. And I saw that the only way I was going to get to where I saw as a possible future vision was to put all these smart people together so that they all had a stake in each others’ future.”

As he’s keen to point out, “once you build an audience … you still have to keep pushing yourself to deliver more value because what people need and what people want—their expectations always go up”.

in effect, the creation of Copyblogger Media was the only way Brian could see to optimize the productivity of his operation and keep improving his offering in future.

13Brian Clark

“A bit of a control freak”

“Apparently I’m a bit of a control freak!” Brian laughs. “I don’t see it, but yeah, I’ve heard it a couple times.”

Yet Brian quickly saw that his desire to keep control over the finest details of his operation would prevent his new company from achieving its full potential. slowly, he’s learning to let go.

By way of example, Brian explains, “Sonia Simone has been … with me for three years as, you know, as a major function of Copyblogger the blog …. and it was just last week that I said, ‘Okay Sonia, you’re in charge of the blog.’ ”

While Brian admits he’s taken similarly close control of the other aspects of the business, he’s learning to let go of them, too.

“I’ve found that because … I was able to put this team together from all of these parts, and that they are able to communicate with each other directly, a lot of initiatives drive forward without me being the hub in the middle—I’m more of ‘here’s what I see and here’s my advice, and you guys make it happen. And let me know if you need to come back to something.’

“And I think that’s how really great companies work,” he adds.

However, he admits that timing is important. let go at the wrong point, and the business’s productivity—and potential—can suffer.

“During the spring, probably prematurely, I tried to back off on purpose, and it didn’t really work out,” Brian reveals. “It turned out that my partners didn’t want it, and I didn’t either. You know?

“It was one of those things where you feel like, ‘Well, okay, everyone needs more autonomy.’ And yet it wasn’t the right time, and no one really wanted it—no one was clashing or asking for Brian to be out of the picture. So I came back and we’ve struck a good balance.”

Balancing priorities

Balance isn’t just about people management, though—Brian explains that, with different parts of the business doing different things, balance is also important in priority management. And the blog, he says, will always come first.

“You have to think partly like a media company. That’s what’s replaced marketing,” Brian explains. “It’s about content, not pitches or … just throwing out what you want people to hear in order to sell something, because you’ll sell very little.

“So the blog is so important,” he says. “We run that as almost a sacred division of the company. Everyone from the CFO to the coders to the support staff knows that that platform, that content, is what made everything possible, and continues to.”

“Instead of being, ‘Oh, the blog,’ it’s central … day in and day out, probably more of my attention has been focused on making sure that we’re delivering on what our initial promise was, which was that content.”

14Brian Clark

Secret weapon• A clear vision of what needs to be

achieved—even when it was a step toward a bigger, as-yet-unknown goal.

Pro blogging productivity tip“Knowing what I want to achieve drives everything,” Brian says.

“Have a big vision, but have smaller steps: “what would I like to achieve this quarter? This year?” Even down to this month or this week. These are small discrete goals.

“‘Because I’m not really good, trust me, at this grind-it-out productivity stuff. I’m not.I just know where I want to get to, and then I go, ‘Okay Brian, if you want to get there, what have you got to do? You gotta do this, and this, and this, and you better sit down and do it.’

“If the goal means something to you, you will do it, and you will find a way.”

Key points• Your vision is everything.

• Ignore the “accepted wisdom”: let your audience relationships motivate you to produce what readers actually need.

• You don’t have to go it alone—consider partnering with others.

• Find a way to translate that big picture to small weekly goals, and give team members the freedom to meet them.

Abby LarsonClear divisions of labor

Profile• Founder of StyleMePretty.com,

which has:

– a network of twelve sites

– a readership of around 500,000

– over 8.5 million monthly page views

– 1.5 million monthly RSS views from over 25,000 RSS subscribers.

• Runs the network with husband Tait.

Philosophy“Collaborating with good partners and being really careful about who you work with is one of the keys to business success and growth … making sure that the people that you work with are a good fit is really key for me.”

When Abby larson talks about the process she and husband Tait follow to keep the eleven styleMePretty network blogs updated with 75 posts each week, she includes her children in her explanation.

“Tait,” says Abby, “works on all of the technical elements of StyleMePretty. He’s a software developer … and he makes sure that StyleMePretty is running fast, he develops new programs and tools and all the things that we’ve been kind of iterating on since the very beginning. He also manages a small tech team.

“And then I do all of the creative, so all of the content and business development and things like that. And I have a small group of girls that write for me. So we’re managing just totally different things.

“I think we’re one of the rare families that splits everything literally fifty-fifty,” she adds. “Some days, he takes on more than I do; some days I take on more than he does … because the site is so dependent on both of us, you know, we realize that we both need to commit equally to our family.”

in an average day, she says, “Tait starts working right away at 8am as soon as the sitter comes. And I kind of putter around and make sure the kids are good to go, and then we usually both head into our office, which is right down the street.

“And we put our noses into the computer and we don’t look up until lunchtime. And then we go back again for another few hours, and we have to be home at five so that our nanny can leave. And we have family time—strict family time—from five until the kids go to bed. And then we pick the computers back up and start going again until ten or eleven.

“It’s a long, busy day,” she adds, “but it’s a good one.”

Good partners: the key to balance

Not surprisingly, these blog business owners struggle to strike a balance—both between work and home, and on the blog itself. Partnerships have been central to Abby and Tait’s success.

“I think anybody with kids struggles with work-life balance, whether you work from home, for someone else, or [on] your own,” Abby explains.

“Managing work and home is very, very hard for us. I prefer to work out of my home and I always have. But as of the last six months my daughter has not been letting me do that at all. So my life is constant chaos, and it’s that reason that I have started working almost exclusively at our office,” she reveals.

The couple have a sitter whose hours with the larsons have increased as the family—and the business—have grown. “Pretty soon I think we’re just going to have a full-time sitter living in the house with us,” Abby says.

15Abby Larson

The couple has also hired teams to help make the blog itself as productive as possible.

Take content, for example. “Until two years ago I was writing to blog by myself. I was doing between six and ten posts every day and it was exhausting. And I had a baby and I was just a mess. So I started taking on writers, and now we’re up to seven writers total.”

styleMePretty is now also heavily driven by crowd-sourced content, which means reviewing hundreds of wedding submissions each week. The expanded writing team has been invaluable in making this happen.

Product development is also made easier by partnerships. The blog’s monetization strategy involves various products—including a line of invitations, and a curated collection of gowns—which are created through project partnerships with specialist providers.

“I think that collaborating with good partners … is one of the keys to business success and growth,” Abby reveals, adding that “letting go of that control and letting your partner do what they do best is also pretty critical”.

To do that, she says, you need to choose partners carefully. “With the bigger projects, like the invitation line, we made sure to align ourselves with an amazing company—we’re partnering with William Arthur, which is one of the biggest, most well-known invitation brands in the invitation space,” she enthuses.

“And they have a long-running tradition of producing really beautiful goods. So we knew we were in good hands.”

Working with great partners doesn’t just allow the team to produce great offerings: it also allows Abby to focus on the core of the business: the styleMePretty blog itself.

“Totally streamline everything”

“We know what the core of our business is: it’s our blog, and it’s producing great content that brides come back to and may kind of become addicted to throughout the wedding planning process. And that’s what we do best.”

Abby and Tait have worked hard to make sure that they can do as much as possible with the blog. The site’s unique functionality has been developed over time to suit the changing needs of the styleMePretty team, so they can better meet reader desires.

says Abby, “We’re mostly innovating because of needs and wants that our team sees … it comes a lot from comments and questions that brides leave on the blog.” Reader engagement with the bloggers is an important element in the blog’s evolution, as are conversations on the styleMePretty Facebook page.

“We have a lot of brides on staff,” Abby adds. “So when we’re planning new things for the site, and new tools and fun things to build into the content, we really think about what we would want to read if we were a bride.”

in implementing that new functionality, Tait aims to make its management as easy as possible for the blogging team.

“Tait has built a lot of tools that totally streamline everything,” Abby points out. “For example, we get around 400 weddings submitted to us every week. So Tait built a submissions tool where someone looking to submit their wedding can go online, they can upload images, they can add their description and their credits, then send it over to us.

“We can quickly review it, upload it into our Galleries, and then from our Galleries we can build our Inspirations Boards that we use to display photos on our blog that have rollover credits with links to the individual websites.

“And then they also go into our image galleries that the brides can click through. And then we can also tag them by colour and subject and category. These tools make dealing with 400-plus weddings so much easier.”

16Abby Larson

Abby believes in working to her

strengths.

“i think that collaborating with good

partners … is one of the keys to

business success and growth,”

she says.

Also, she notes, “it’s important to

know when to cut your losses.”

Favorite productivity technique

Another important aspect of streamlining? learning to say “no”.

When to say “yes”—and how to say “no”

“Saying ‘no’ I think is not my strongest suit,” Abby admits. “So I tend to get myself knee-deep in projects that I probably shouldn’t because, you know, they’re not going to help us in any way.”

given that she’s so busy, Abby has had to hone her approach to taking on new projects.

“I try really hard to look at every new opportunity. I try to take the personal out of it and try to run it past two filters: is it going to extend our brand in a really positive way? And is it going to make us money? And if it’s not going to do either one of those, I try to say no.

“There are always exceptions to the rule, and things that I think are going to be quick and end up being pretty lengthy, and involved,” she concedes. “But for the most part, I always have our business, and the health of our business, as my focus. So that really helps in weeding down the list and crossing things off.”

in working on external partnerships, like the invitation line, Abby notes that there are additional factors to consider.

“When we bite off some big project like that we always kind of weigh it against the time that it’s going to take us a) away from our core business and b) away from our family. And if we think we can balance that in the great scheme of life, then we usually try to move forward with it.”

Abby’s noticed that one of the reasons bloggers have such trouble saying ‘no’ is that “People get attached to their ideas … but if it’s going to hold you back more than it’s going to push you forward, then letting it go is probably the only way.

“Things go into fashion and they come out of fashion,” she argues. “And readers get tired of something … so I think it’s important to know when to cut your losses.

“We’ve had some pretty pricey mistakes along the way,” she reveals, “and we acknowledge those and we operate to cut them loose or to remove them completely from our site and move forward, rather than wasting time managing something that might not be working.”

17Abby Larson

Secret weapons• Building strong relationships.

• Streamlining processes.

Pro blogging productivity tip“I think that if you’re just starting out at blogging, consistency is key,” Abby suggests. “It’s knowing that every week or every day or three times a month, you’re going to put out really beautiful content, and you stick to that.

“When your readers know that they’re going to come to your blog and they’re going to see something great and new, then they’re going to be inspired to come back again and again.

“Carve out a moment every week to make sure that those blog posts get written at the same time, and that you’re really consistent with the content that’s going out.”

Key points• Your commitment to your life must

support your commitment to your blog—and vice versa.

• Always look for ways to streamline so you can increase productivity.

• Get help where you need it, and be prepared to let expert partners do what they do best.

• Readers can help you identify which direction to take—and which projects to drop or decline.

Matt KepnesLeveraging limitations

Profile• Founder of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site

including the popular travel blog

• 10,000+ RSS subscribers.

• 13,000+ Facebook likes.

• 31,000 Twitter followers.

Philosophy“I force myself to limit the amount of time I’m working, and … say, ‘Okay, I have to get it done then.’”

Matt Kepnes runs one of the longest-standing travel blogs in the business, so it stands to reason that he’d have forged some strong ground rules for productive travel blogging.

As it turns out, this seasoned traveller’s “strong work ethic” is also essential in helping him stay productive.

“I think about work a lot,” Matt reveals. “I like what I do, so I’m always thinking about it. I work on the website pretty much every day, so it’s always on my mind.”

While most of us might find it difficult to get the motivation or time to write while we’re on holiday, Matt’s passion for what he does has helped make the blog a success. in fact, he doesn’t differentiate between work and play at all.

“It’s all really one and the same,” he explains, “because I write about my travels. Work doesn’t dictate where I go, or anything like that. But it’s really the same thing … when I go somewhere, I’m going to write about it, and then I need to go more places so I can write about it, so I can keep the blog going, so I keep making money, so I can go someplace to write about.

“It all feeds into itself,” he adds.

How does he choose where to travel (and work) next? That, he says, depends on where he’d like to go, and where he’s never been before.

“I always try to do a mix of places I’ve been and places I haven’t done, so I’m not always revisiting the same old places.”

Creating boundaries from freedom

Matt’s passion for his work has allowed him to establish some practical guidelines for getting things done while he’s travelling and having fun.

“Productivity is getting all my writing done,” he explains. “A good day, I’d be able to get all my writing done … Being on the road a lot, you get lots of good story ideas, so I am always writing.”

Not only does this blogger never suffer from writers’ block, he’s got months of blog posts stockpiled so that if he can’t get a post written for some reason, he can use a piece he’s already prepared.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to the story ideas,” he explains. “Whatever I feel encompasses the destination—it could be a story about the place, it could be just budget tips, what I did, or expectations I had about the place, and whether they were met or not.”

Matt usually writes in the mornings, and then follows up with another stint before he goes out in the afternoon.

“That doesn’t give me time to do everything,” he admits. “I usually … after a few weeks of putting stuff off, will take a few days and just sit down and do everything.”

18Matt Kepnes

Matt batches the blogging tasks he

can’t fit into his daily schedule, and

dedicates a set amount of time to do

them all at once.

“Usually, after a few weeks of putting

stuff off, [i] will take a few days and just

sit down and do everything,” he says.

Favorite productivity technique

At those points, he makes sure he’s alone, “because it’s hard to sit around and work when you’re travelling, meeting people … they want to go out, and you want to socialise and meet people. You don’t want to just be a hermit in your hotel room, blogging away and never interacting with anybody.”

When we interviewed Matt, he was actually on a holiday from travelling, drafting a book from home in the states.

“I put my business hat on”

“I think a lot of bloggers … just write. They think that’s what they’ve got to do: they’ve got to write,” Matt observes. “But this, he says,is only part of the picture.”

“Since I have a business background, I think I put my business hat on when I think about [the blog] … I look at it as a business, and that’s helped me be successful in terms of thinking about marketing and SEO and using social media and designing the website,” he explains.

But where does he fit all these tasks into his limited schedule?

“I’m a notorious multi-tasker,” Matt reveals. “So I am always juggling a lot of things. I could be working on SEO at the same time I’m going through my photos while I’m also adding information to my website. I’m most productive when I’m focusing on one thing, obviously, but I do multi-task a lot.”

Matt’s travel schedule sees him take at least 25 flights each year, and this, he says, is a good time to do the smaller blogging tasks.

“I do all the little things,” he says. “Writing, going through my photos, organising stuff, I draft emails—all those little things.”

But Matt’s ultimate goal is freedom, and his approach to productivity really does support that ambition.

“I try to have a to do list, and I try to say, ‘On Saturday, I’m going to do XYZ; on Sunday I’m going to do ABC, and Monday, DEF,’ and that way, it breaks up and also keeps me limiting doing the work,” he explains. “Because if I just have ‘To do: one through ten’, I’m just going to sit here all day and do it.

“But if I say, ‘today I’m going to do this,’ once I get that done I’m free.

“I would say that I force myself into boxes to work. I force myself to limit the amount of time I’m working, and that way I say, ‘Okay, I have to get it done then.’ Otherwise, I’m on the computer all day multi-tasking, sitting on Facebook and Twitter.”

Matt also notes that in periods of intense work, he’ll go offline completely, so that he’s not distracted by social media and the web.

Have workflow, will travel

in 2011, Matt started working with a content editor.

“I think the bigger you get the less excuse you have for making minor grammar mistakes,” he argues. “Whereas some bloggers have plenty of time to reread, I’m always on the road, so I don’t always necessarily have the time to devote 100% to the blog … and when you’re travelling and trying to run a business at the same time, you might miss a few commas and words here and there.

“It’s good to have another set of eyes.”

Matt’s other set of eyes is inevitably separated from him by thousands of kilometres, as well as timezones. so how does he make sure the editing process works to increase his productivity, rather than hinder it?

19Matt Kepnes

“Usually I go through writing spurts,” Matt begins. “So I won’t write for a while, and then I’ll get really in the zone, and I’ll bang out seven articles at once.

“I usually do a framework for them—I won’t complete them—so I’ll do a frame and a draft and then I’ll add to that maybe two or three times until I get something workable. And then I send it off to my editor to read it.

“Then she sends it back to me, and then I rewrite it or add to it after another set of eyes have seen it and after I haven’t seen it for a while. Then it goes back to her, and then it goes up on the blog, and I read it once more before it goes live.”

This process might be a burden if Matt didn’t have a backlog of posts waiting to be published—and the creative ability to continually add to that backlog so that it doesn’t run down.

The other piece of the puzzle is, of course, technology. As he points out, “I’m never in a place where there’s not wifi. Sometimes there’s not good wifi, but I can always find something.

“If I know I’m going somewhere where there’s not good wifi, I’ll usually upload photos for the upcoming blog posts, simply because sometimes you don’t get enough bandwidth to upload them.”

Planning—in terms of time and technology—is obviously central to Matt’s productivity on a week-to-week basis.

In the zone

Despite his passion for his blog business, Matt does have periods where the creative juices are at a low ebb, and his desire to travel peaks. While other bloggers have to switch between writing mode and business mode, Matt also has to juggle travelling mode.

“It’s not an easy switch sometimes,” he concedes. “Sometimes you’re in the work zone when you’re travelling, or you’re in the travel zone when you’re working.”

As your own boss, he says, the temptation to indulge the day’s greatest desire—be it work or travel—can be great. But at the same time, he knows that some structure is required if he’s to continue his travel blogging lifestyle.

“I’m trying to break away a little bit and try to not work as much as I do, just focus more on the travelling,” he explains, adding that while this has been a difficult challenge, he feels that he’s finally achieving it.

That’s ironic, Matt adds, “because it’s almost the end of the year!”

20Matt Kepnes

Secret weapons• A notepad and pen.

• Plenty of offline hours spent in airplanes each year.

Pro blogging productivity tip“Set out a limited amount of time, like you’re only going to work for x hours,” Matt recommends. “The Internet, blogging, it’ll take as much time as you can give it. So you can spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a website. It’s really easy to get sucked in, especially with social media.

“So you only work from 9 to 6 or 5, or 9 to 12. I usually work from 9 to 11, and then I come back at like 4 to 6.30 when I travel.

“That way, it forces you to be productive, because you only have that time. So if you’re on Facebook for two hours instead of working, you don’t get anything done.”

Key points• A stockpile of quality, edited blog posts

gives you the flexibility to work to your own rhythms.

• Realise that writing is only one part of the blogging puzzle: don’t neglect the others.

• Discipline is a matter of responsibility. When you’re your own boss, the future of your blog rests entirely with you.

• Don’t let barriers like time or distance prevent you from forging partnerships that can help you to become more productive.

Heather ArmstrongGetting the job done

Profile• Founder of dooce.com, one of the

longest-running blogs (since 2001).

• Manages the dooce community,which has over 40,000 members.

• Author of It Sucked and then I Cried and Things I Learned About My Dad in Therapy.

• Runs dooce with husband Jon.

Philosophy“If I don’t update my website, we don’t make money and we don’t eat. So productivity to me is managing my time and those who work with me and my family enough that I can get my job done.”

“I’ve had ten years to refine and master what my boundaries are, and they’re constantly shifting and moving,” says Heather Armstrong, one of the world’s longest-standing and most popular personal bloggers.

While she’s talking specifically about the content-related privacy issues that personal bloggers face, these words reflect Heather’s overall approach to successful, productive blogging.

As she explains, “I set a time every day that I leave the desk and I go down and I’m with my children. And if I still have work to get done, I’ll do that after I put them to bed. Because time with my family, you know … the best part of this job is that I can make time for my family.”

dooce is a flourishing personal blogging business that’s been supporting the Armstrongs since 2005. How does Heather manage to successfully mix the personal and business sides of life?

Not a happy accident

Heather says that when she started dooce, she “never expected more than a couple of dozen people to read it”. Yet the blog’s a phenomenon. of course, that success is not the result of sheer serendipity.

“I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to be productive,” she says, “because I have a really bad habit of procrastinating, and in this business, you can’t.”

she describes blogging as being “kind of like … Speed, the movie about that bus that can’t stop going at a certain speed or it’ll explode. That’s kind of how the Internet is … you can’t really operate a content-driven website or property without refreshing that content on a near-constant basis.”

she also describes herself as ambitious and competitive. “I like to do things well. I like to feel accomplished,” she says. And these drives have shaped her approach to blogging.

“A lot of people stop blogging after … just a few months, because they realize just how much work it is. The biggest advice that I give to anybody who wants to run a successful website is, you’ve gotta work your butt off. I work harder at this than I have at anything else.

“To keep [my readers] coming back, I have to continually get better. I have to post more. I have to keep honing my craft.”

“Sit down and work through it”

Heather’s creative approach operates on a number of levels, and all of them have firm boundaries.

“People think that I’m a giant open book and I write about everything,” she says, “when really, you know, 95% of what goes on in our life isn’t talked about, ever.” As a married mom with two young daughters, privacy is paramount for this personal blogger.

21Heather Armstrong

At the same time, she argues, “I think people like my voice and they want to come back because I think my persona is, ‘I’m gonna tell you anything. I will tell you whatever you want to know’ … I just don’t always.”

even within those limits, shareable story ideas can come at any moment. When that happens, Heather explains, “I usually don’t drop whatever I’m doing and run to the computer. Usually I’ll make a note of it.”

Yet a single story idea isn’t all it takes to create a post.

“If I’m going to write about the fact that I’ve injured my leg because of running, there’s like six or seven different anecdotes that have happened during the week that I will bring into that story.” she adds that she tracks ideas “either filed in my head, or … written down on a piece of paper somewhere”.

When it comes to the actual writing, Heather admits that she reads and writes a lot.

“I’ve practiced this craft for the last ten years; I haven’t practiced anything else more. And it’s about just sitting down and working. I mean,” she adds, “every writer gets writers’ block and I get it frequently, and it can be a very painful physical pain.”

Her solution? “You just have to sit down and work through it.”

Managing time limits

Heather estimates her work on the blog is a 60-hour-a-week job; her husband Jon also works full-time managing the dooce business. An assistant, a sitter, and a supportive extended family make the juggling of commitments possible.

But within each working day, Heather manages time stringently.

“There’s specific hours that I schedule for community; there’s hours that I schedule for photos,” she explains. “We block out a specific amount of time for writing and no one is allowed to talk to me during those blocks of time, so that I can be productive. My daughter’s piano lesson is scheduled in there as well.”

everyone in her team uses shared google Calendars that are synced to her phone so that Heather can stay on top of shifting commitments both at work and at home. of course, things don’t always go to plan.

“Sometimes, that schedule goes right off the rails,” Heather admits. “It’s having all the other days go smoothly that makes that one or two days off the rails doable.”

To get a clear view of what’s going on, Heather does a schedule review at the start of each week.

“Either on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, I’ll take a look at my week and what’s required of me … I sort of do an overview of my whole week so that I know what to expect.”

“When the night ends in tears”

While Heather seems to have conquered her tendencies to procrastination, as her blog and family grow, she’s always testing the limits.

she defines “productivity” as “Making it to the end of the day pretty much! If I can make it to the bed without, you know, falling asleep before I get there.”

indeed, her life can be extremely hectic.

“Some days are really, really nuts around here,” Heather reveals. “I mean, at any given time there’s seven people in the house, and I got two crazy dogs who are barking because somebody’s walking outside the window, and headline news may call me and say that they need a mommy blogger to have an opinion about some sort of product on the market and so I’ve got to rush, get camera-ready, go downstairs to a room where the dogs can’t be heard or the baby can’t be heard…”

22Heather Armstrong

“Just sit down and work through it,”

is Heather’s mantra.

“i decided that when this was going

to be my job, i was going to take it

very, very seriously, meaning, like

i was going to work hard at it, and

i was going to work hard to get

better at it.”

Favorite productivity technique

so how does she know when something’s negatively affecting her productivity?

“Usually when, um, the night ends in tears,” Heather reveals. “That’s usually my body saying, ‘Something’s out of whack… the balance is off.’ …I know something needs tweaking … when my body is like, ‘we can’t go in this direction or in this speed anymore. Something needs to change.’ ”

That’s an ongoing challenge for Heather, though.

“I want to be able to do it all,” she admits, and says that often, saying “no” can feel like failure. Recently, despite committing to run the New York City Marathon with an organization called every Mother Counts, Heather had to reduce her hours of training. And that meant telling her personal trainer, “No.”

“It was actually a really hard conversation to have with her,” she says, “because I felt like I was failing her. Like, ‘I know you think I can do this, but I can’t.’ And I hate to admit that about myself, but in order for me to live my life and to be a good mother to my kids and to be responsive to my audience, I can’t be in the gym for seven hours a day.”

Another area that’s a constant challenge for Heather is vacation time.

“For me … the personal blogging aspect … that’s the murkiest in terms of productivity is that I can’t ever go on a vacation. And when I do leave town or I have a business meeting or I’ve got a speaking engagement, I have to, the week before, basically work double what I’m doing so that I can stage content so that it goes live while I’m gone.

“Because people want to see fresh content,” she adds. “They don’t want to come and see that you haven’t updated for two or three days.”

Heather’s rigorous multiple-posts-per-day schedule certainly sets a challenge in terms of taking a break, but it’s one she seems bound to master.

23Heather Armstrong

Secret weapons• A good mental filing system for ideas.

• A notepad and pen.

• Google Calendars

Pro blogging productivity tip“Being consistent is really key to success,” Heather declares.

“Something that’s helped me recently … is at the beginning of the week, either on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, I’ll take a look at my week and what’s required of me that week. And I’ll scribble down ideas about what day I want to post this, or what topics I want to discuss.

“And I sort of do an overview of my whole week so that I know what to expect, and I’m not suddenly panicked on Thursday afternoon because I haven’t updated my website.

“It takes a lot of the anxiety out of the job … just to take a step back and get a perspective of the overall way you want your website to flow for the week.”

Key points• Be consistent in your blogging.

• Listen to your instincts to set blogging boundaries you’re comfortable with.

• Blogging is hard. Accept that, and just work through it.

• Success depends on continuous improvement, and continuous productivity.

• Focus on getting better at what you do.

Jeff GoinsProductivity by deception

Profile• Writer, idea guy, and difference maker.

• Blogs at goinswriter.com

• Named one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers, 2011, by WritetoDone.

• Now writing first print.

Philosophy“I trick myself into doing things that are important and find ways to either break them down into small, manageable chunks, or … just make them fun.”

“My day job sort of gives me a lot of flexibility, and yet I don’t really have any accountability. So I’ve had to create arbitrary things to force me to stay productive and not just stay in bed or sit on the couch all day.”

Jeff goins is candid about his approach to productivity.

“I’m just terrible at being consistent about [productivity] when I’m being honest,” he says. looking at this prolific blogger’s body of work—and his schedule, which involves a mix of writing and leading the innovation team for not-for-profit Adventures in Missions—it’s hard to believe he has trouble with productivity.

since he’s creative, he says, “any system for productivity or prioritization is usually a weird one, and one that I use for a season and then get really bored with.

“Really, I’m just tricking myself—I’m just finding a way to lie to myself long enough to get the thing done.”

“Whatever seems to be urgent at the time”

“As a communicator, I can get really obsessed and addicted with whatever seems to be urgent at the time,” Jeff explains. “So Twitter, email—anything that has that instant gratification, I just struggle with that because I want to do that first, ’cause it feels urgent. But I can spend a whole day doing that and not focusing on what’s important.”

Most bloggers could relate. But when it comes to the freelance work that Jeff receives as a result of his blog, that work style isn’t always successful.

As an example, Jeff is editing a book for his boss. “This is actually the convergence of two worlds—freelance writing world and my day job. So you’d think I’d be really passionate about it.

“But it’s a book—it’s like 80,000 words or something! And so I have this plan that I’m working, but I do not even want to begin to look at it because I know that I can’t do it in one sitting. And so that instant gratification thing that I was talking about, I don’t get that.”

To get the job done, Jeff began breaking the book into small chunks. “Not even chapters,” he admits, “because the chapters are too long … and I’ll do them in little pieces. Like twenty-five minute blocks.

“And then I’ll have to stop and go, ‘Okay, I did that, that’s good. Now go do something else, like reward yourself with something else that is more fun.’ ”

This small-task-and-reward system is central to Jeff’s approach to working productively on big projects. But he has one more trick up his sleeve.

24Jeff Goins

“Just get started.

“That really, for me, is the hardest part,”

says Jeff. “it’s just creating momentum.

so if you can do anything to begin and just

scribble something down, start writing one

word a day, whatever it is to just begin, i

think it’s like a bicycle: each pedal gets a

little bit easier.”

Favorite productivity technique“Another thing I do is I create an enjoyable context,” he reveals. “Like last night I downloaded the Mumford and Sons album, and I made myself a carafe of really good coffee, and I was like, ‘I have to do something I don’t want to do, so I’m going to create the most enjoyable context possible. I’m going to listen to music, I’m gonna drink coffee, and I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna do it, and I’m gonna set aside this much time to do it.’

“And for me, the CD, which is like forty-five minutes, was my egg timer, and when that was up I was done—whether or not I was actually done with it, I was done.”

Starting is hard

like many bloggers, Jeff has a love-hate relationship with writing.

“I don’t enjoy writing. I do—I actually enjoy it when I start doing it, but I don’t know, there’s something about starting that feels really hard,” he ponders.

As we all know, the difficulty of starting is what leads to procrastination—something to which Jeff’s no stranger.

“This weekend is a perfect example,” he says, “because I had this big, long weekend, my wife was out of town, I told myself I was going to do all these different things. But, I stayed up late, didn’t sleep much, and I still didn’t get really anything done!”

obviously, this is a big problem for a professional writer—and one who works mainly to his own schedules without direct accountability. so Jeff’s devised a couple of techniques to overcome this hurdle.

“I have over the past several months, maybe the past year, developed a practise of pretty much writing every single day, no matter what,” he says. Now he writes for an hour or two every morning, predominantly working on pieces for his blog.

The second is the time limits he mentioned with the editing project.

“The same thing I did with the book, I did with a personal project. I said, ‘I’m going to do this for an hour. I’m going to sit down, and I’m going to time myself and when the time’s done, even if the project isn’t done, I’ve put the work in.’

“And so I did it, I ended up finishing it—it didn’t take much time at all. In a way I had to trick myself to just sit down and do it,” he adds.

For Jeff, starting seems the biggest hurdle, and limiting his time like this is a workable solution.

“To create … you have to produce”

“I find that if I have a lot of possibilities and opportunities, I squander [the time], which is just a general rule of creativity for me, and I think a lot of creatives,” he suggests. “It’s all about possibility—I could do this and I could do this and I could do this.

“When you rein that in, when you create an artificial canvas onto which you can place your art, that’s where I think real genius happens, because I think without structure, we just go, ‘Well, I’m just going to sit here. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

“And even arbitrarily when I create structure, that’s where really great stuff happens.”

These days, once he starts, the creative muscles he’s built with his daily writing regime mean he can get the work finished. “When I’m under a crunch it’s not hard, it’s not as hard as it used to be because I’m constantly doing it.”

Jeff doesn’t see a clear divide between creativity and productivity. “Creativity is creating things,” he advises. “In order to create something you have to produce, you have to have a product.

25Jeff Goins

“And so if I write something and I kept it on my laptop, and it never changes anything or anyone, then I’m not really creating, I mean not in the sense that I want to be creating, anyway. So I have to be productive in order to be creative.”

enter: Jeff’s philosophy of constant production.

“I have daily deadlines,” he reveals, “and I know that in order to do really good stuff, I have to work ahead. That essentially requires me to be constantly creating.

“For me to be productive, I have to have those two things: a deadline—a self-imposed deadline—and some sort of weird system that works for me that allows me to just constantly do it.

“The more that I do it, I find it’s not easier to start, but it’s easier to actually finish,” he says.

Distractions and opportunities

As a remote digital worker, Jeff faces the full gamut of online distractions: social media, blog comments, and so on. But as he explains, he’s learned to see these as opportunities and tools, rather than mere distractions.

The way to make sure he’s not deceiving himself, he says, is to ask the question, “Is there going to be an action associated with this, or am I just doing it to do it? To waste time or stall actually creating something meaningful, or because I don’t want to do my job?”

Jeff used to respond to every Twitter @ reply he received, but now, he doesn’t have time. on the other hand, he says, he tries to respond to almost every blog comment—an increasing challenge as his blog and profile grow.

“Relationships are important to me,” Jeff explains, “but not surface relationships. I have, you know, a message that I want the world to hear, but I’d rather go deep with a few than just kind of stay on the surface with everybody.

“And I want to be available to people,’ he adds, “and that’s sort of a balance for me.”

React or create?

The final technique Jeff uses to help keep himself on the productivity straight-and-narrow is to consider his purpose.

“In a given moment, if I have a choice between reacting, responding to something that somebody says, and creating, I used to respond,” he explains. “Now I’m leaning more towards creating.

“Not to blow off the audience or reactions to a certain piece of content, but because that’s what I do, I create. I’m not a salesman, I’m not a customer service rep, I’m a writer, I’m a creative, I’m somebody who creates content with the hope that it could change the world.

“And so if I have a choice, and often I do, between reacting or responding to what somebody else has said, and creating something new, I want to create something new … I’m trying to … create more because it’s what brings me life, it’s what I think brings other people life.”

26Jeff Goins

Secret weapons• Evernote

• Tricking himself into being productive.

Pro blogging productivity tip“Stop stalling and begin … just get started,” Jeff advises bloggers who want to be more productive.

“That really, for me, is the hardest part, it’s just creating momentum. So if you can do anything to begin and just scribble something down, start writing one word a day, whatever it is to just begin, I think it’s like a bicycle: each pedal gets a little bit easier.

“And then you start to build up speed and momentum, and the same energy that you would exert to get going is now sending you down the road at 20 or 30 miles an hour.”

Key points• Find a way to start, and you’ll find it easier

to finish.

• You don’t have to be a productivity pinup hero to get stuff done.

• Create an enjoyable context in which to complete difficult tasks.

• Evolve your approach to creating as you develop as a creative.

• Do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Gretchen RubinHappily productive

Profile• Runs The Happiness Project blog

at Happiness-project.com

• Author of four books, including international bestseller The Happiness Project.

Philosophy“When you’re happier, you have more reserves, more emotional resources … all these things that feed into productivity. I also think that when you’re productive, you are happier.”

“I think that happiness and productivity are really interconnected,” gretchen Rubin asserts. “They boost each other, but they can also kind of drag each other down if they’re going in the wrong direction.”

A prolific writer and blogger, gretchen’s leading her tribe through an ongoing Happiness Challenge. This, coupled with her research for her book and blog, lets her draw many parallels between productivity and happiness.

“To think about moving in the right direction is more helpful than thinking about hitting some goal,” she advises. “It’s not like running a marathon, where you train for the marathon and then you run the marathon and then it’s crossed off your list. Most of the things that I do for my Happiness Project are things that I have to do every day.

“And every day I have a new chance to keep my resolution, and sometimes I have a new chance to break my resolution. But every day is a new chance.”

How does she make sure she’s on track with her happiness challenge—and, thereby, her blog?

“I keep very detailed resolution charts, which are modelled after Ben Franklin’s virtues charts,” she says, adding that they’re “like a happiness to-do list”.

“I have all my resolutions and the days of the month, and I really check off whether I kept a resolution or broke it,” she explains. “That’s how I hold myself accountable.”

The notion of accountability is crucial to gretchen’s sense of productivity, and her ability to produce.

“I do think that if you want to make changes and see yourself moving forward, it’s very helpful when you are very clear about what you’re expecting from yourself, and also really holding yourself accountable.”

Research, inspiration, and creation

While the blog and the challenge are undoubtedly a part of that, gretchen doesn’t feel that she must be happy in order to blog on the topic.

“I don’t feel any pressure to be happy all the time. And I don’t think a happy life is one where you don’t feel unhappy or you don’t feel pain. I don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t even really think it’s a worthy goal … but I try to learn from it,” she says.

gretchen’s awareness of her own happiness is a part of the research she needs to do to create blog posts and bring to life concepts like the Happiness Challenge.

27Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen loves to experiment. “sometimes i get my idea from what is going on in my own life, and then sometimes i get my idea from something that i’ve read or something that i’m thinking about, and then i sort of tie it in to my own life,” she says.

Favorite productivity technique

When she’s unhappy, she says, “I really try to understand, well what’s going on in my life? Why am I feeling this? What could I do differently? Because actually these negative feelings are very helpful and very important signposts that things should change.”

she spends a lot of time researching in other ways, too.

“The way that I think is by reading and taking notes and writing. And so I’m constantly reading every day anything I can get my hands on on happiness … from the latest science to the great philosophers to popular culture…

“I read a lot of biographies and memoires, ’cause there’s sort of hints there about happiness, or hearing how different people talk about it in their lives; novels, I have a ton; movies—anything, television. I’m lucky,” gretchen adds, “because it’s a subject that infuses everything.”

The next step, she says, is to take what she’s learned and see how it applies in her own life.

“I’m always thinking about, well, what do I see in my own life, or how would I make this true for myself, or how do I see this reflected in the people around me? … I try to really reflect on it through my own experience.”

This reflective approach to production has allowed gretchen to make a concrete blogging niche out of what seems an indefinable topic.

“The more you do, the more creative you become”

“When I started my blog,” gretchen explains, “I really set myself the goal of blogging six days a week.

“I think for creativity, certainly for me and I think it’s true for a lot of writers, the more you do, the more creative you become. It’s part of the discipline of sitting in the chair and facing that one page—that’s when you start and you generate ideas and you’re always in it and you’re always thinking.”

Post ideas come naturally as a result of gretchen’s research.

“Sometimes I get my idea from what is going on in my own life, and then sometimes I get my idea from something that I’ve read or something that I’m thinking about, and then I sort of tie it in to my own life.”

This personal element is important, she says, because “seeing specifics and specific stories helps people understand things better”.

As we’d expect, gretchen’s personal life presents plenty of post ideas, too.

“For example,” she recalls, “I wrote very quickly just a little sentence that I read about how when people tease they feel like it’s pretty good-natured, but when people are teased, they perceive it much more negatively. And it’s this one little sentence in an academic paper. And I posted it and I thought, ‘This is really interesting.’

“In my family growing up we were never allowed to tease each other, and I thought that was kind of a killjoy attitude. But in retrospect I think that was actually very good and it made for a very happy atmosphere, and maybe this is part of why—because of this little thing I read about teasing,” she posits.

“And lots of people commented on what they thought about teasing. So it was almost like I just had this one little thing that I notice, and make one observation from my own life, and it turned out that many people had their own experiences that they brought to it…

“I was able to point it out, or bring it to their attention—bring it to light as a subject—and that’s very satisfying too.”

28Gretchen Rubin

Priorities and places

gretchen has a number of competing priorities to juggle, and distractions are everywhere. she manages this challenge in an unusual way.

“I really delineate [what I’m doing] by where I’m sitting,” she reveals. “If I’m in front of my three monitors and I’ve got the internet on, and everything’s going, it’s very hard for me not to pay attention … When I work in my home office, that’s when I do blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, email—that’s when I’m connected.

“Then if I need to reflect and do really heavy-duty thinking, like I want to work on my book, or I want to write a blog post that’s going to take thinking and I want to be able to focus, I go and I either work in a coffee shop or the library that’s about a block from my house. I take my laptop and then when I’m there I don’t look at anything.”

gretchen says this approach helps her to resist the temptations and distractions that can make it difficult to actively produce.

“When I’m in one place, I do one kind of work, and when I’m someplace else I do a different kind of work … also, I’m kind of a restless person … So for me moving around is really good, because I’ll do something for a while and then I’ll get that restless feeling and … I’ll switch to a different kind of task.”

This approach hints at gretchen’s understanding of how she works best. of distractions like email and social media she says, “When I’m [in my office], I just open it up, and if you open it up, you read it, if you read it, you respond, and an hour goes by.”

she also feels that “outer order contributes to inner calm”, so she takes time to keep her workspace clear. “It used to feel kind of like creative and cool and busy to have all this stuff everywhere,” she admits, “but I realised actually I do better when I have surface space and everything’s put away.”

she similarly declutters her to-do list using a “one-minute rule”.

“Anything I can do in less than a minute, I do. If I can read and email and answer it and delete it, I do. If I can stick a form in a file, I go ahead and do that. And that sort of keeps those very low-level tasks under control.”

says gretchen, these small steps contribute to “the pure joy of feeling like I have that space and calm”.

29Gretchen Rubin

Secret weapons• A flexible approach to working that

associates tasks with physical locations.

• The one-minute rule.

Pro blogging productivity tip“Have something to say,” gretchen says. “When you have something to say, writing is much easier.

“A lot of people—this happens surprisingly often—you’re in a situation where you’re trying to come up with something to say and making a piece of writing. And that’s hard, because what are you going to write about? And how can you write for 500 words? And it just feels very kind of arid.

“But when you have something to say, then writing is very satisfying. And the more clearly you express your idea, the more gratifying the process becomes.”

Key points• Greater productivity can translate to

greater happiness.

• Failing to be productive can reduce happiness.

• Consider moving yourself physically to avoid distractions.

• Introspection can help you create more valuable content, more easily.

• Don’t write unless you have something to say.

Leo BabautaStripping it back

Profile• Mindful living expert.

• Blogs at zenhabits.net since 2007.

• Has a subscribed following of over 230,000 readers.

Philosophy“Strip away all of the friction that gets in the way of an idea becoming a reality.”

in 2011, one of the web’s longest-standing and most popular lifestyle bloggers, leo Babauta, decided to undertake a project called No goals, in which he’d live a life without the kinds of objectives the rest of us take for granted.

it was scary, he said, but it didn’t stop him being productive.

“It turned out the goals were getting the credit for all the work that I’d been doing,” he explains. “But the real thing that drove me to do these things was that I love doing them. I am passionate about them—they excite me in the morning when I wake up.”

it was his desire to do the things he loves—writing, spending time with his family, reading, and having fun out of doors—that motivated him to act each day.

Gut feeling

While most of us use goals to guide our activities and measure our achievements, leo points out that usually, the goals are arbitrary, so they can’t tell us if we’re headed in the right direction.

“Let’s say I want to get 10,000 readers on my blog, for example,” he suggests. “Well, who came up with that number? Where did it come from? Why is that important? Why is that the right metric?”

Moreover, leo feels that goals can “mask the fact that sometimes we’re not headed in the right direction. But since we’re headed toward that goal that we set for ourselves a few months ago, we feel that we’re making progress in the right direction.”

This raises the question: how does leo know that what he’s doing is productive?

“I go basically by feeling,” he explains. “Does this feel right to me? Do I feel like this is in line with the principles of my life, of being compassionate, helping other people, doing things that are right for me and my family—those kinds of principles.

“And if I feel that this is in line with those values then, yes, I feel it’s in the right direction, but there’s no way to really know when you start out except by doing it, and then see how that feels. Is it in line with your compass?”

“Simplify and strip down”

if, like leo, you decide not to have goals, it follows that you lose structure too: there’s no to-do list, no yearly planner, no readership target.

leo doesn’t just see this as a good thing; he argues that structure is one of the main causes of stress.

“When you’re structured,” he says, “it just ends up being frustrating because you don’t always meet the structure that you set … Basically your day is filled with anything and if you had a structure that you had planned, and it doesn’t go according to that plan, then you’re messed up.”

30Leo Babauta

By contrast, he says, when your time’s unstructured, “it’s really a huge, open container that you can do anything you want with. I mean, you can fill it with anything”.

Although most of us would see a void like this as terrifying, leo has found that once you let go of structure and goals, and do what inspires you, great things can happen.

“My blog will do just fine whether I track it or not. Do I need to pressure people into buying my ebook? Do I need to come up with a big launch? When I do a course online do I need to say, ‘There’s only this many slots,’ to make it seem like they need to make a decision now, otherwise the slots may be filled up—scarcity?

“I found that the answer to almost all these things is no, almost none of them is necessary,” leo reveals. “And only when we do that will we find what’s really necessary, really important, and we realise that we can simplify and strip down the rest.”

so if none of this stuff matters, what does?

“For bloggers … writing really powerful posts is by far number one. I’d say it’s 95% of what matters for bloggers.”

The human experiment

Unsurprisingly, leo doesn’t differentiate between personal and professional blogs—“Where do you stop as one persona and start as another?”—but sees his blog as an extension of himself: “My whole life is me as a professional and a family guy and a personal guy, all mixed together. And there’s no walls or barriers between them.”

so how does his personal-professional blog work?

“ZenHabits is a personal blog because it’s a reflection of the experiments that I’m doing in my life. And so it’s a personal documenting of those experiments, and I share them with people because I think that they find those results interesting.

“So when I experiment with No Goals, people will find those interesting. They may not actually use them, but at least it’s data that they can look at to decide things in their lives, and they can also look at it for inspiration, like ‘Maybe I should try this; this looks interesting.’

“And I think as a result that becomes professional information that people can use in their personal and professional lives.”

in this way, leo’s blog is, effectively a product of (and contributor to) his life. By stripping back his lifestyle to its most important elements, he’s created the time to focus productively on both.

leo’s readers love the honesty that this practice promotes in his content. But for him, it’s an elementary aspect of blogging.

“I think when we leave out, or strip out the personal parts, I think we are not being honest about who we are. We’re leaving out the pain. We’re leaving out the truth. And I think that’s a disservice to our readers.

“I promote [these ideas] only because I’ve found that they’ve worked for me, they make me happier, and I hope that they would make other people happier.”

“On a whim”

He continues, “I absolutely believe in taking an idea and making it real. I don’t think that you need to set certain goals for the future to make that happen. I think it happens if you’re driven by the excitement of that idea.”

This single-minded approach to creativity sees leo characteristically buck another blogging trend.

“I wrote something about not keeping an idea list because I found, again through experimenting (you know I used to keep long idea lists) … that the things that go on the list are not the things that I’m most excited about: they’re the things that I can put off until later.

31Leo Babauta

“Do what’s really necessary,”

Leo advises.

“strip away all of the friction that

gets in the way of an idea becoming

a reality.”

Favorite productivity technique

“But when I have an idea that is so exciting that I think it’s a really good idea, I will jump up and want to do it right away. That’s, to me, the thing that drives that idea to become real, because I think it’s so amazing that I don’t want to do anything else but that right now. And I’ll do it and it will become real.”

This passion saw leo spontaneously write an ebook in collaboration with his readers over google Docs while on vacation in guam last year.

“One morning, I woke up and said, ‘I want to write a book called The Effortless Life.’ And so I did, I started a Google Doc right that morning and started typing out the ideas.

“And then I shared that document with the public, just on a whim, and I let them watch me write. And then I let them edit it. It was this big group writing project and it was so much fun, and it was one of the most fun writing things that I’ve ever done.”

While other, more goal-focused bloggers might see this kind of spontaneity as a distraction, or mere impulse, leo’s clear-thinking philosophy allows him to acknowledge, trust, and follow his instincts.

A philosophy for producing

leo’s philosophy of productivity has a number of components.

The first is to “strip away all of the friction that gets in the way of an idea becoming a reality.

A small example is a post for my blog. I strip away all of the things that you have to do to get that post out in to the world. Part of that is social media distractions—clear away all of the distractions, and it’s just me and the text.

“And I’ll write the text really quickly and I’ll slap it onto WordPress post editor and type a headline and press Publish. And that’s before I formatted anything, before I put links in, before I put my credit in or anything like that. Because all of those things slow the idea from going out into the world.

“What I’ll do once I press Publish is go back and add stuff in, but the idea has already gone out into the world… By removing the unnecessary things, I found that the idea becomes real much faster, because there’s less friction between when I have it and then it going out into the world. It’s almost instantaneous, that happening.”

leo also encourages bloggers to let go of their expectations about results, because, he says, “I’ve found that I’m much happier with the work that I do when I let go of those expectations.”

He also advocates “putting things out into the public and using that as … a motivator, an inspiration, a feedback tool, a creative tool”. The conversations that will ensue, he says, “enrich those ideas, make them better. When you get that feedback, you can take that feedback into account and change the ideas…

“That public conversation, I think, is hugely productive.”

32Leo Babauta

Secret weapon• Doing what feels like meaningful work.

Pro blogging productivity tip“Make a list of everything that you do as a blogger,” leo recommends. “All the things, including tracking your analytics and doing affiliate sales and putting up ads and managing ad systems, social media, emailing—all of those things—and make sure writing blog posts is on there.

“And then take away everything but writing blog posts. And leave that as your only to-do item as a blogger for the day. Even if you have another job, which I did when I started blogging, make writing your post the only thing that you have to do ... the only thing that you need to do is write an amazing post. Something that shares something that you’ve learned with the world, that helps the world out. Help people achieve their goals, solve their problems, make their lives better. And then strip the rest of it away.”

Key points• Strip away what doesn’t matter so you

can focus on what’s important.

• Collaborate with your readers to create information that really matters to them.

• Don’t be caught up in society’s—or the blogosphere’s—expectations of productivity.

• Keep yourself in your blog; don’t try to separate your personal and professional personas.

Radically improve your productivity

As this ebook shows, each blogger has a unique approach to getting things done. each of us defines “productivity”—and “success”—slightly differently than others do.

For these reasons, no productivity philosophy is foolproof or guaranteed. However, these nine steps have been formulated with input from the nine bloggers we interviewed to give you the potential to dramatically improve your blogging productivity.

The degree to which they help you will depend on your commitment to your blog, and how willing you are to implement these bloggers’ tips and advice.

in 9 steps

1 2

3Just get started

Next, you need to begin.

“That really, for me, is the hardest part,” Jeff goins admits. “Do anything to begin—just scribble something down, start writing … whatever it is to just begin.”

You know what you need to do. Where can you start?

• Open a new document and type the first sentence of whatever it is you have to write. or grab a pencil and write it on paper if you prefer. give yourself one minute to do this—no longer.

• Choose one aspect of the task and spend five minutes listing ideas you’ve had about it on paper or a whiteboard. At the end of the five minutes, pull those ideas into a to-do list. Commit yourself to completing the first item on the to-do list today.

• Log out of social networks, switch off the phone, shut the door, and immerse yourself in this task for the next 30 minutes. set a timer so you know when your time’s up.

Just get started, Jeff says, and you’ll find it easier and easier to keep going.

Mindmap it

Now you’ve got a bunch of ideas, or maybe the opening line of a post (or email, or sales page, or product!) you need to write.

At this point, Darren advises you to go deeper: mindmap the task.

He uses mindmapping as a tool to spark new ideas. “I was always taught that if you get lost in the bush you should always … try and retrace your steps,” he says. “In some ways that’s what I try to do in ideas as well… I try and go back to a place where sparks were flying, and recapture some of the sparks that I didn’t follow up on.”

get those sparks flying! Use a mindmap to:

• plan a blog post or series

• concept a product, like an ebook, newsletter sequence, or training series

• get your head around a large challenge involving multiple tasks or interdependencies

• dig deeper into the intricacies of a certain issue, topic, or task.

Your mindmap should help you to hone your blog post outline, streamline your to-do list, or prioritize your next steps on the task you’ve chosen.

34Radically improve your productivity in 9 steps

Work out what’s really necessary

leo Babauta advises bloggers to focus on “what’s really necessary”.

While it can seem like everything’s necessary when it comes to blogging, Leo’s suggestion makes a good starting point for beginning each blogging day.

Whether you’re devising strategy, researching a post topic, emailing an ad partner, or launching a product, stop for a moment and ask yourself, “What’s really necessary here?”

“Strip away all of the friction that gets in the way of an idea becoming a reality,” says leo, and instantly you’ll gain the clarity to focus on what actually needs to be done right now.

Whether you have a full day to spend on blogging, or just the next hour, choosing to do what’s truly necessary is the first step to blogging productively.

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Experiment with it

Now that you’ve built a strong focus, try an experiment.

experimentation breeds natural fascination, wisdom, and the experience that blog readers rely upon.

of her blog posts on the topic of happiness, gretchen Rubin explains, “Sometimes I get my idea from what is going on in my own life, and then sometimes I get my idea from something that I’ve read or something that I’m thinking about.”

Find a way to experiment—on and off your blog—with the task you’re working on.

instead of just reviewing potential affiliate products, contact the owners and ask for trial versions of each one; or, research new, more unexpected ways you can present them to your readers. instead of writing a practical guide to cake decorating, go into the kitchen and decorate a cake, creating a photo essay of the process as you go.

As gretchen says, experimentation is the best way to tie your blog and your work into your own life, which makes it more enjoyable for yourself and your readers.

Dedicate the time

Can’t fit in an experiment right now? Need to focus on less intriguing aspects of blogging, like invoicing paying clients or sifting comments for spam?

Dedicate the time to the task, Matt Kepnes advises. if a task you need to do doesn’t fit into your regular schedule, set a time to go off on your own and get it done in one go.

often, it’s a mistake to expect that you can fit every aspect of blogging into your regular schedule. There will always be tasks you don’t look forward to, or that you need to have a certain mindset to do well.

While Matt writes “all the time”, he often needs to set separate chunks of time aside to “put his business hat on” and attend to business blogging tasks. Do you?

Work through it

You know what you need to do, and you’ve already made a start. To get it done, says Heather Armstrong, your challenge is to “sit down and work through it”.

Ultimately, blogging is work. But as Heather reminds us, we’re not just working at blogging, we’re working at being better bloggers.

“I decided that when this was going to be my job, I was going to take it very, very seriously,” she says. “I was going to work hard at it, and I was going to work hard to get better at it.”

Treat the hard work of completing the task you’ve set as a chance to become a better blogger. You might just find it more rewarding as you work, and when you reach the end.

35Radically improve your productivity in 9 steps

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Take a break

Yes! You’ve completed a blog post draft, contacted five new blogs you want to guest post for, or drawn up an outline for your next product.

Time for a break?

Yes, says Amy Porterfield.

“Every day, there’s about 20 minutes in my day that I just allow myself to spend some time on Facebook, check out things unrelated to work, and just socialise.”

it’s important to give yourself permission to do things like this, she says. “That way … there’s no guilt associated with [the break], there’s no hurry to it.”

Take a break, she says, reduce the stress levels, and then get on with your blogging.

Work to your strengths

You’re on a roll now! Turns out Jeff was right about that whole momentum thing…

…but what if, after your break, you’re dragging your heels on the next task?

Perhaps you’re forcing yourself to do something that’s not a strong suit for you. While all bloggers have to tackle tasks they don’t like, Abby larson points out the importance of learning your weaknesses.

she believes it’s most productive to work to your strengths. And for the other areas?

“I think that collaborating with good partners … is one of the keys to business success and growth,” she advises. if you can outsource parts of your work that don’t come naturally, or you find particularly challenging, do it.

But don’t just stop there. Abby’s also a big believer in saying “no,” both to new ideas that don’t fit with the blogger’s plans, and to existing projects that aren’t relevant any more.

“It’s important to know when to cut your losses,” she says. Drop the unproductive projects so you can focus on those that really deliver.

Reflect

Productivity isn’t just doing; you also need to think about what you’re doing.

“As a writer, and as a CEO, a lot of what I do would be viewed as staring out the window doing nothing,” Brian Clark says. “But it’s actually the most important thing that I do.”

For Brian, that process of reflection is continuous: he’s “never not working”.

Before you start a task, as you’re doing it, and after you’ve completed it, allow yourself the space to reflect on it.

• Could you have done it better?

• What will you do differently next time, and why?

• What new ideas seem like good ones?

• Why did unsuccessful ideas or projects not succeed? Why did others work? What insight does that give you for your future blogging?

• How can you apply your experience to make current or proposed projects extra successful?

Reflect on today’s work to make tomorrow’s blogging even more productive.

36Radically improve your productivity in 9 steps

37Further reading

Further reading

Continue the discussion of blogging productivity with Darren on:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Google Plus

some of his favorite blogs on the topic are:

• Seth Godin’s blog

• The 99 Percent

• Zenhabits.net

• Goinswriter.com

• 43Folders.com

Also take a look at these articles on Problogger:

• Productivity Systems: Do they Really Help You Blog Better?

• Seth Godin on Blogging and Productivity

• 9 New Productivity Tools to Simplify Your Online Life

• 10 Surefire Ways to Overcome Blogging Procrastination

• How I’m Eliminating … Okay, Minimizing Distractions and Getting More Done

• Time Management for Travel Bloggers … and Others

• How to Make Sure You’re Functioning at Your Creative Best

• How I Conquered Being Undisciplined and Started Getting Things Done