Money Saving Mom®

Missed the first posts in this series? Check them out here.

#3 Write Daily

With the exception of Sundays and the very occasional day off, I blog every single day. This might seem exhausting to some people, but honestly, I’ve found that I’m much more inspired and creative when I’m regularly exercising my writing muscles.

In fact, it seems the more I write, the more inspiration I have to write. When I was in the middle of writing my book, I felt like my brain was going to explode with all the post ideas coming to me everywhere I turned.. There wasn’t time enough to write half of them, so I just had to tuck them away for later.

Truly, creativity breeds creativity. If you want to blog regularly, don’t wait until you’re feeling inspired to write… just write!

Schedule a Daily Writing Time

Set a daily scheduled writing time, put it on your calendar, and train yourself to keep that commitment like your life depends upon it. Soon, it may become such a habit that you would be able to imagine going through your day!

Eliminate Distractions

When you sit down to write, you’ve got to focus on the task at hand. This is not the time to be checking social media, answering emails, or surfing the internet.

I’ve found that I work best when I shut down email and all other online distractions, set the timer for 15 or 20 minutes, and just dive in and write until it goes off. I’m amazed at how much I can get done when I just shut everything down and work in concentrated chunks. {Since I usually write in the early mornings, I can usually accomplish this without worrying little people walking in and needing their mama right then. :)}

Create Conducive Conditions

What are your ideal writing conditions? If you don’t know, now’s the best time to find out — especially because you’ll want to schedule your writing time when you’re going to be at peak performance.

Some questions to ask yourself/things to experiment with:

• Where do you do your best writing? Try writing in different rooms in your home and in different work spaces. I don’t write well sitting at a desk, so I have a big comfy writing chair in my office that most all of my posts are composed from.
• When do you do your best writing? I am usually freshest first thing in the morning,
• Do you write best with a pen and paper or do your ideas flow best when you’re typing on your computer? I do some of both — I usually outline my posts with pen & paper (more on that in a later post) and then type up the complete post on my laptop.
  
• Does music enhance or detract from your creativity? For me, most of the time it detracts. But I know that certain kinds of music really gets some people’s creative juices flowing.
• Do certain actions fuel your inspiration? I find that washing dishes, showering, and exercising are often times when I get great writing inspiration and ideas. I often exercise right before my writing time — it seems that getting my heart rate up really gets my brain cells firing, too!

You can’t always hit our ideal conditions every day, but put forth effort to do everything you can to make your environment as conducive for great writing can go a long way in making your writing time more productive.

Do you write daily? Why or why not? What are your ideal writing conditions?

“How do you come up with post ideas?”

A few weeks ago, I was with one of my dear blogging friends and she asked me this question. She went on to explain how she wants to blog more often, but she struggles to come with inspiration for what she should post.

Honestly, I’ve never really thought about the how behind coming up with ideas. In fact, I usually have many more ideas than I have space and time to write.

But her question really got me to thinking about what fuels my blogging inspiration. And as I’ve mulled over it the past few weeks, I came up with a number of things that I find help me to always have post ideas and inspiration.

Since this is a question I’ve been asked before, I thought I’d share my list with you all in hopes that it might spark some ideas for those of you who are feeling like you’re in a blogging slump. I had initially planned to share this as one post, but it got so long that I decided to break it up and just share one idea per week day for the next two weeks so that it was easier to read — and not some massively long and impossible-to-read-in-one-sitting post!

#1 Live Vibrantly {Offline}

A vibrant offline life will fuel your online creativity. Make sure you have a healthy balance of face-to-face interaction with friends, family fun {that you don’t blog or tweet about}, and media-free time blocks in your day.

I can’t tell you any hard and fast rules on this, because what is healthy for one person might be unhealthy for another. I can say, however, that if your brain is constantly trying to conjure up a blog post from every experience or if the only reason you ever plan a party or do an activity with your kids or bake anything is only so you can blog about it, you probably need to step back and re-evaluate.

One of the best decisions we made when I first started blogging was that I would take Sundays off from blogging/social media. I’ve found that I often have to unplug in order to recharge. Stepping away from the online noise once a week clears my head and helps me to remember what matters.

Real-Life Example #1: The Circus Post

Some of my best posts come as the result of getting offline and just living life. I’ll be in the middle of real-life and a post just comes and smacks me right between the eyes.

Such was the case with the post I wrote after we went to the circus. As soon as the whole episode happened, the analogy came to me.

I told Jesse about it as we were walking to the car and he thought it was a great idea for a blog post. So I emailed myself a few random sentences on my phone in the car on the way home and then wrote the post, Whining For a Shiny Plastic Toy, when I had time a few days later.

To be continued tomorrow…

How do you maintain a healthy balance between your online life & your offline life? I’d love to hear!

If you are struggling to find a healthy balance between your online and offline life, I highly recommend Sarah Mae’s new ebook, The Unwired Mom.

I read it recently and found that it was packed with great suggestions, practical tips, and a lot of motivation and inspiration to not become too consumed with online activities and miss the life to be lived and blessings to be had right in our own homes and communities.