This is a topic on which I have often debated with other bloggers. I strongly feel  that time management is one of the prerequisites of  blogging. This is why 99% of the bloggers either leave or keep blogging for few cents for years.  I analyzed my time spent and trying to discuss some common time wasting things for bloggers that needed for blogging time management.

1.  Alexa, Analytics and adsense

Do you know how much time you spend in checking alexa rank, viewing

analytics and adsense.  Is it really necessary to check visitors/income/rank time wasting habits of bloggersevery minute? Checking the stats again and again does nothing but killing your precious time which could have been utilized in writing valuable posts. Check the stats only once a day only to get a broad idea and how your SEO is working.

2.   Subscribing to a lot of RSS feeds

As  bloggers we are trying to accumulate a lot of rss feeds to get new ideas for blogging. I know a few  people who subscribed more than 200 feeds.  This is the major time waster we need to take control of it.  Subscribing to a fewer number of feeds related to our blogging intrests definitely do some good.

3.   Themes and plugins

Most bloggers change their blog’s theme very often and keep downloading new plugins every time they see a good looking blog or nice plugins in it. would this colour look more attractive, Maybe the sidebar could be wider, or footer look better in blue, or this ad unit would better suits here. Don’t think more about the theme/plugins. Leave the template alone and spare some time for this once in a week.

4.   SEO and Link Building

People nowadays start doing a massive link campaign and waste lot of initial enthusiasm and effort in doing so just after few posts. In order to promote our blog or websites, all of us spend some time at social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. You may be making friends, adding favourite sites or updating your articles to be indexed by these social bookmarking sites. We all know link building helps blogs a lot. But is it the only thing to succeed in blogosphere ?  All those great bloggers out there have written over 1000 posts to succeed. Initially we need to concentrate more on blogging, not on the SEO or link building.

5. Email, IM and social networking

Do we really need to reply to every email as soon as it hits the inbox? We are not working in the help desk of emergency services. Also with online chats, we are constantly checking who is online, so that we could “talk” to them. This is another counter-productive activity! Try to Check email once/twice a day.

Many people spend a lot of time at Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, or Friendster in the name of social networking or keeping in touch with friends and family. However, a lot of them go there to play games and do other unproductive activities.

To a certain extent, we all are guilty of this. Try to find your own ways to get out of this. Stop Thinking and Start blogging.