The blogger’s link between planning and reaction time [Hack Your Day]
Reaction time is very important nowadays, especially if you work as a blogger or as someone else who feeds on info. I need to fix some problems at my day job again so I didn’t write new posts, but had a few draft titles written up. I had a Prism review on my agenda three days ago, Lifehacker covered it yesterday; I had a Doomi review on my list since Monday, gHacks covered that this week too. As you can see a lot hangs in the balance and staying on top of all this info is an important task.
The way I found I can get there before anyone else (or at least at the same time), is to carefully plan my information scraping technique. Getting your news regularly as a habit will increase your productivity much more than if you would actually be sitting in front of your RSS feed for 24 hours a day. The reason is that you have to write and publish these stories as well, not just read them. Therefore I suggest two different approaches, you can decide which works best.
As I have said, I separate about 30 - 60 minutes of each morning to read news. This includes feeds, websites, even newspapers if I am so inclined. I transfer everything I want to write about into separate drafts and during the next 2 hours I write up the stories. I publish either the most interesting ones or the most relevant ones (like a Firefox update) and the rest of the day I can spend covering the less important stuff.
Another method, which is to read all about the news before you go to bed, transfer everything to drafts and then write about it first thing in the morning. This way you can probably get rid of those not-so-good ideas quickly and you are starting to write with a fresh mind, which is always very important in productivity.
Whichever you choose, I recommend separating the actual reading of news and writing as much as possible, to avoid distractions. I also advise writing when you are at your freshest, regardless of when you read news. A story which is perfect, but a few hours late will be fine, but covering something first with really appalling quality will kick you in the behind after a while.
Original post here: Daniel
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