Create Systems and Routines to Manage Your Mom Blogging Time

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

The biggest challenge professional bloggers face is time management. If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you know it’s a lot of work — probably a lot more work than you originally thought it would be.

And if you want your blog to grow, the natural line of thinking would be to work more. The problem is that as humans, and especially as moms, working more isn’t always an option. It sounds cliché to say you need to work smarter, not harder, but it’s so, so true.

As you grow, start thinking in terms of being a manager, not an employee, of your blog. The reason is that managers approach business differently from employees:

They see the big picture objectively. Managers can make decisions based on what’s best for the company, not on what is most fun or easiest to accomplish.
They delegate. Managers evaluate people’s strengths and weaknesses. They ensure that the right people are working on the right jobs, and will take them off any projects that aren’t suited to their skill sets.
They keep an eye on the bottom line. Managers know what parts of the business are most profitable and will dedicate more resources to that part of the business.
They streamline and consolidate. Managers can analyze where time is spent in the company and make it a priority to invest in tools or projects that will reduce overhead and increase productivity.

These aren’t easy shifts to make for any business owner who has spent years being a one-person show. It means letting go of control, giving up doing some of the things you love, and paying more attention to nitty-gritty details such as spreadsheets, tax write-offs, and legal protections. But here’s what can happen if you don’t manage your business instead of being your own employee:

Burnout: Put this one in the “been there, done that, and don’t want to be there again” category. When you’re self-employed and you work too hard, your business can consume every aspect of your life. It’s not like a job you can leave for the weekend or quit.

You’ll think about work while doing laundry, playing with your kids, and even while you’re supposed to be on vacation. It’s an awful way to run a company.
Mistakes: When you get overwhelmed with the day-to-day work of running your business, it’s so easy to make mistakes. These can be small, such as messing up your template and not noticing it for a week. Or they can be big — and you can find yourself redoing months of work or losing out on a lot of income.
Hinder your growth: It’s a common fear to think that running a bigger business means more work and more responsibility. So you may just keep your blog at a lower level of success than you’re capable of.

However, when you step back and treat your blog as a manager would, it actually frees up more of your time and energy — not the other way around. It may take a bit of a time investment to get it to yield that reward, but it’s so worth it.
Go out of business: You may know the awful statistic that a little under half of new businesses go out of business in less than five years’ time. Sometimes, this really isn’t a bad thing.

But you can back yourself into a corner by the aforementioned mistakes, and ruin a great gig for yourself that could allow you to work from home and have more time for your family. If that’s your goal, then preventing these pitfalls needs to be a priority for you.