Set Blogging Limits

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Blogging to Death ever since the New York Times wrote about the deaths of high-stress bloggers Sunday. It’s discussed in the recent post here, “Is Blogging Killing You?” There is also a post, “What’s Wrong with the Blogosphere?” at Performancing, where Raj Dash points out:

I find one day’s blogging to be far harder work than producing, say, 1,000 lines of computer code in one day. (The industry standard for programmers used to be about 10 lines of finished code per day.) Each blog post has to be researched, drafted, edited, posted, and sometimes promoted. That takes a lot of time, and current blogging rates really aren’t worth it. But more to the point, it’s not easy coming up with fresh, interesting articles every day. Writing is a creative activity, and we are not creative every day. For this reason, I find myself blogging at odd hours, seven days a week. I’m certain that this is also why so many other bloggers burn the midnight oil.

Blogging is an odd career in a sense, combining the demands of a job at a nonstop news wire or 24-hour news channel with the anti-social issues of working from home and experiencing isolation. Those two factors combine to make it difficult to draw the line between work time and leisure time. There are readers around the clock, and you don’t physically leave your office.

It can strain relationships. Much like spouses of doctors and cops, you can always be “on call” for your blogs.

Shoot, I am working on this post at 11 p.m. on Monday night. What does that tell you? I don’t have to, but I find it easier to finish this the evening before it’s due.

That means it’s all the more important to draw the line between blogging and living. Here are some tips:

• Have blogging hours. Yes, you might get beaten by another blogger on something. Make your peace with that. If you can’t stick to daily blogging hours, at least have a couple blog-free nights per week.
• Raise your blogging rates. Part of the issue here is that bloggers accept far too little pay. Are you writing for an embarrassing rate while the blog operator pockets most of the money? Raj recommends writing for at least 50 percent revenue share so that you, as a blogger, share in the success. Either way, decide what your standard is and stick to it.
• Fire the bosses that eat up the most of your time and pay you the least for it. You might want to find a better-paying blog job first to keep your income stream steady, but don’t be afraid to trim off demands that are a low return on time investment for you.
• Be firm about your available hours. It isn’t reasonable for someone to expect you, as a blogger, to be on call and writing posts around the clock. State when you can post, and stick to it. If that is an issue for a blog publisher, it’s probably time they hire multiple bloggers and spread the demands around.
• Be wary of blogging jobs that are especially time consuming. There are many blog job posting that seek an awful lot of copy (sometimes it’s 600 words, 5 days a week). If you can handle that and the pay is appropriate, go for it. But not all blogging jobs are equal. A once-weekly blogging job that pays $50 is not equal to a twice-daily blogging job that pays the same.
• Step away from the computer! As often as possible, get the hell away from the computer. Get outside. Yeah, that’s the sun! Meet friends. Real friends, not Twitter friends. Take a yoga class. Get a cup of coffee (don’t bring your laptop!). Go for a walk or a hike. It’s easy to get sucked into the computer and never walk away, but it’s crucial to your mental and physical health that you do.