Jack (Jill? Jane?) Of All Trades: How Do You Manage?
This blog has taken a turn for the personal lately. Oh well. It’ll turn back to the academic and professional soon enough. And, either way, you like reading about my personal struggles. I can tell. 🙂
As many of you know, this blog was started as part of dual-course project for my graduate classes this summer. Both the Good Wife paper and the Literacy in the Feminist Blogging Community project began with my passion for feminism and activism (and with a little help from The Undomestic Goddess) and ended up being this blog with what seems like a loyal following – a good deal of readers and commenters. Although it was initially intended to be a place to simply publish and organize my research and writings for graduate school, I started writing more personal posts, and I am finding that I truly enjoy writing in this blog and conversing with all of you, both on here and on Twitter, about feminist issues. It’s a nice way to both receive feedback on my graduate school/thesis work, as well as explore women’s rights and feminist issues in a more personal way.
Now, summer is over and both graduate school and my full-time job as a high school English teacher are starting. I’m finding that I actually spent a lot more time on this blog and Twitter than I realized, and I’m starting to see that I’m going to have to figure out some way to do all of it, because I really enjoy all of it. I’m not worried about blog material so much, but I do feel that when I write posts at night and schedule them for a later date (and read starred tweets and schedule them to RT at a later time on HootSuite) that I’m not really adding to the conversation so much as planning out things for you to read. Like a true teacher, right? I’m also having trouble keeping up with the 200 or so people I follow on Twitter (cut down from around 260; I can’t cut any more!) and the 50 or so blogs I follow on my Google Reader. It’s time consuming to compose posts, read tweets/links, set up links to RT, AND feel like you’re participating in the conversation.
I can’t look at my internet presences very often while I’m at work, and I like to do things besides stare at the computer for hours after work, so I’m wondering: those of you who juggle multiple activities like this, what do you do to manage the load? Any advice for a fellow feminist blogger?
I’m not very good at this, and I don’t follow nearly as many things as you do. If I don’t read my columns and sketch out a quick post before I get dressed in the morning, chances are it won’t happen at all. I overslept by half an hour today and realized it had no impact on my coffee/breakfast/dress/pack lunch routine….but there was no way I was going to blog.
I don’t really balance much of anything lol
I’ve been trying to give myself a sort of schedule, but I’m not doing so hot so far. I will say that it’s only recently that I started using twitter to promote my posts and retweet others’ posts as often. Before I just used it to interact with people, so this is a bit new for me. I find that I’ve also stopped subscribing to some blogs because their twitter posts all of their feed anyway. *shrug*
I try not to worry about things so much. I worried a lot more in the past when I was just starting out. I checked my stats constantly, craved feedback, etc. I realized after a while that I was stressing myself out. For a couple of months, personal circumstances meant that I didn’t have time to post anything substantial for a while, and it was after that when I realized that I was too worried about it all. So I’ve tried to take the stress out of it and have actually started to blog more substance since then. (Hopefully, I didn’t just jinx myself…)
So I guess just relax, take it easy, loyal readers will still be here if you need to take some time away. =)
To-do lists with deadlines whether self-imposed or externally-imposed are probably my single most important tool in this regard. I can see what I have coming up and when, which helps me decide how much time I can spend blogging or commenting on any given day.
I also have all sorts of reminder alarms (on computer and phone) set for things I have to do on a regular basis.
On Twitter, I learned I can’t read it all. I have a column (in HootSuite) for my family’s Tweets, and I always catch up on those, but everything else I just read what’s on the screen when I’m on Twitter. I used to try to read all the old Tweets I’d missed overnight and such, but soon realized that’s just insanity.
I’m having the same balancing issue; two blogs, Twitter, editing a novel, and still spending time with, you know, real live face-to-face people… I keep telling myself I’ll write my blog posts on Saturdays and set them to post during the week, but I keep not doing that. So I guess I don’t have much advice 🙁