Earlier this year, I started a new blog in hopes of me getting back to dedicating more time for my writing. The goal was to write one article a week as I had finally broken free of my burnout from blogging. In the first few months of the blog, I wrote about half a dozen posts but by Spring new articles were no longer being published at Fifty-Two Posts a Year. I once again found the demands of work, family, outdoor hobbies, and managing my other websites were of higher importance. So, time marched on and I now find myself with one more website that started with good intentions but now resembles a ghost town with too few visitors and too little new content.
Given that I no longer accept advertisement at socPub (formerly CMS Report), it's been a strange year for me to acknowledge that I spend so much of my "free time" managing and maintaining a website that gives back so little in return. The time I spend working on socPub comes at a cost to the other projects I've wanted to start or complete. You see, I have a problem. I'm a hoarder of websites and social media accounts and like any hoarder of things...there is too much of a mess in my house to see any value in any of what I already possess. It's time to clean house and I'm going to do so by focusing my cleaning on one room (one website) at a time.
Instead of putting my attention everywhere, I've decided that I'm instead going to focus on one website or one social media account at a given period of time. As an example, if this is Fifty-Two Posts' month then I'm going to be spending a lot less time on socPub. At another date, if I decide I want to get my LinkedIn account in good working order...then that means I'll be spending less time at both socPub and Fifty-Two Posts. Get the idea? My long-term goal is to find out which digital projects are of value to me and my readers and which are not.
So for the next several months, this is what my Editorial (Project) Calendar will be looking like:
- Powered by Battery - September-October 2018
- Dakota Imagery - October-November 2018
- LinkedIn - December 2018
- Fifty-Two Posts and Medium - January 2019
- Twitter - February 2019
- BryanRuby.com - March 2019
- Facebook - April 2019
- socPub - May 2019
- Instagram - June 2019
- Google Plus and Photos - July 2019
- Dakota Imagery Group - August 2019
When I'm focused on one project, I won't be completely abandoning the other projects. However, I will most definitely be spending minimal time to maintain and respond to those trying to reach me through those other websites and social media accounts. In a year's time, I plan to rid of what I find is of no value to me and spend the rest of my time focused on improving and maintaining what remains.