AMNH — Maya Stone Calendar by David Cesarino, on Flickr

So my laptop is now working, more or less (thank you AVG PC TuneUp, even if I had to uninstall it afterwards to prevent it sludging up everything it had cleaned!). Now that I’ve lost that excuse, it’s time to give some serious thought to my blogging schedule.

Blogging schedule, you cry? You had such a thing? Well, no, not really <hangs head in shame>. But I am now determined to mend my ways, and have even installed a plugin for an editorial calendar, recommended by Chris Brogan. The excuses are now officially over.

So what’s the deal with a blogging schedule or editorial calendar anyway? And why is this under Personal Growth and not under The WordPress Project, given that it has to do with using WordPress? And what’s happened to my WordPress Project anyway? Not posted on that in a while …

OK, so here are my three reasons for using an editorial calendar to try and keep my projects going and my brain from exploding.

3. Keep Track of Projects

If you are anything like me, thinking up cool projects is not the hard part of the game. It’s keeping up with them and carrying them through to completion. I didn’t even realise how long it had been since I last posted on The WordPress project until I checked my calendar. I need to have it right in front of my nose to make sure I keep some momentum going, or it will just die like all the others in the past.

2. Easy to Work Ahead

When you are trying to work at home with three kids who need to be shlepped around the city, shopping, cooking, even the odd bit of housework (although I try to avoid that as much as possible), stretches of uninterrupted work time are few, far between and precious. If you can work ahead on posts you don’t want to post just yet but have already half-written in your head, you are way ahead of the game.

1.Blogging Consistency

This is the number one reason which really includes the other two. Everybody who is a successful blogger seems to have found that consistency is more important than frequency – if people expect you to have written something on Thursdays, that’s when they will be checking your blog. If there’s nothing there, you’ll drop off their radar. I’m sure I’ve dropped off various people’s radar already …

So here is my commitment to you. Barring emergencies of ER-magnitude (or Passover), I will post three times a week. My plan is to have one on the WordPress Project, one on a new project I’m still working on (which has nothing to do with blogging and everything to do with trying to get my house/life/hair under control), and one on health – Paleo, SCD, exercise or just life.

Please be sure to hold me to this and don’t just drop off the radar! What tools do you use to keep yourself focussed?