You’ve caught up your blog. Now what?

I’ve received the following email from one of my regular readers:

Dear Patricia You’ve now caught up your blogs. Well done! I’ve enjoyed reading all the interesting observations you have about the world but I’m curious, how will you keep your blog caught up? Won’t you just fall back into your slatternly habits? Do shed some insight into your plan.

Sincerely,
A faithful reader*

Dear faithful reader,

I’m glad you asked, as I’ve been planning a blog post about this since before I finished catching up the blog. Your timely email has propelled me forward to actually write it.

Here’s the plan:

First off: I have a specific time (and a back up time) planned weekly to do basic set up for the blog. The official time is Saturday morning post-run/pre-8:00 gym class. That block of time usually gives me 45 minutes to an hour to do the Blog Blessing Hour. More on that below. The backup time is Sunday from when I haul myself out of bed to before I go to church. Having a scheduled time each week to get things in order helps tremendously.

The Blog Blessing Hour. This is an adaptation of the FlyLady’s Weekly Home Blessing Hour in which you spend an hour once per week and get your house in reasonable shape. My Blog Blessing Hour (written down and posted next to my computer) is as follows:

1. Update books read, post to Goodreads
2. Update movie posts
3. On camera, delete all bad pictures
4. Upload pictures to archive
5. Rotate pictures the right way
6. Copy select pictures to the “to print” folder
7. Copy pictures to blog folder
8. Erase photos from camera
9. In blog folder, open with picture manager
10. Compress all photos
11. Rename
12. Put pictures in blogger

It looks like a lot of work, but each step takes a few minutes. Except for the renaming of photos. That can be rather lengthy if an event has happened during the week. Before I was caught up and had this handy list, I would delay doing all of these steps for months. Trying to catch up the reading posts and cross reference it with the Goodreads stuff alone drove me crazy. Plus, I was often afraid to post things because I wasn’t sure if all the movie posts were in their right place and I like to publish in order.

Yes indeed, those of you who think my anal-retentive nature might be hindering my ability to get anything published and contributing to the huge backup are correct. It totally did. But now that I have a weekly list of tasks, I know finish the weekly Blog Blessing Hour with a list of posts IN ORDER to write and publish. All the pictures are in a named post with the right date, all the movies are caught up and in their place and the book post doesn’t get totally out of control. During the week I can spend fifteen minutes here or there writing the posts and then editing and publishing them.

Combined with the above I have two hard and fast rules:

1) Do the Blog Blessing Hour every week or, at the very least–and rarely–every two weeks.
2) If a post is in draft form and is over one month old you have not made this post a priority and I MUST DELETE IT.

Because I don’t ever want to not post a post I had intended to post, hopefully the draconian rule number two will keep me on the up and up.

And that, dear reader, is the plan. Keep reading and see if it works.

*The above letter was entirely made up by Patricia. It was manufactured so she could write a blog post about how she intends to keep her blog caught up. She never has anyone email her with questions about her blog, though she would be happy to answer them if she did.