Finding the Time and Space to Blog*

While many people dream of having their own blog, relatively few achieve it. It’s not that it’s so hard to set up a blog; it’s more about finding the time and space needed to keep it up until it gains momentum. Once you find an audience and your blog starts being a bit more interactive, motivation gets a little easier because you feel like someone is listening to what you have to say.

It helps a lot with coming up with ideas and then writing them up if you have a little area in the house to call your own.

Find Your Space

Whether you’re blogging once a month or daily, you still have to get organised. Having a desk helps, but even if tapping your laptop curled up in a chair is your way of working, you can still have a special blogging place.

In the living room, this might mean reorganising furniture a bit. Maybe swap out a standard side table for one with drawers where you can keep notebooks and cables for charging. 

Alternatively, set up a space in a different room where you can retreat from the TV when you need some space to think. A large dining table might be taking up space in the dining room, for instance, but if you pop that into self storage unit for safe keeping, you could install a smaller table and a desk or armchair for working quietly.

Take a similar approach with spare bedrooms. Could you put bedroom furnishings in a self storage unit to make way for a home office? This would be a real boon as your blog grows as you’d also have space for a small photographic studio for flat lays to illustrate your posts. 

With spare beds in self storage, you can retrieve them at any time you need a bedroom for guests. Swap out the stuff in your self storage room for the duration of your guests’ stay, and you have the best of both worlds.

Planning Your Space

It’s all very well deciding you’re going to have a corner to call your own but before you dive right in, spend a hour or so planning it out on paper. Graph paper helps, but you don’t have to work to an exact scale as long as you get the rough proportions of furniture right. This way you make sure important aspects like traffic flow still work.

You can also make sure you have enough light. Is your space next to a window, or alternatively are there nearby plug sockets for work lamps and computer charging?

Storage is important too. Plan where shelves could go, either above your desk or next to your favourite seat. Having books for reference or inspiration handy without having to get up and go searching helps keep your thoughts flowing without interruption.

Planning Your Time

Finding space is perhaps the easy part. Finding time can be harder. If you find days are slipping by and your blog isn’t progressing, pause to examine your lifestyle. Keep a diary of how you use time for a couple of days, noting down when you start and stop tasks. 

• How much time do you spend on social media, just browsing or scrolling? 
• How much time do you spend watching TV in the evening?
• What time do you get up or go to bed? 
• What time of day do you feel most alive and energetic? 

Use your time diary to analyse where your time goes and how you feel as the day progresses.

If getting started is your challenge, you just have to push through that resistance and make yourself sit at your desk or open your laptop. Tell yourself you’ll focus on it for just five minutes. That’s all you need to open a new document or start browsing online for images or ideas. Once you start, you might be surprised that you don’t want to stop.

Another trick is to use a ten-minute timer. You can download free apps that sit on your computer and tick silently down in the background as you work, going off after ten minutes are up. Challenge yourself to see how far you can get before the timer pings. After ten minutes, either stop and do something different or set up another ten. If ten minutes aren’t enough, try the Pomodoro Technique, which runs in 25-minute cycles. There are all kinds of Pomodoro apps you can try.

Reorganising furnishings with the help of a self storage room can give you a physical space, and discovering your productive times of day can help you carve out some creative time. Once you nail these two aspects of blogging, you’re free to discover all the great ideas buried in your imagination.

A blog is a hungry beast, always waiting for the next instalment, so use every trick you can think of to get it going and keep at it.