5 Ways Bloggers Procrastinate (Without Even Knowing)
By: Shweta Saxena
Tags: Blogging, Procrastination

I love blogging, and the biggest reason bloggers love their job is you’re your own boss- no deadlines, no accountability, no hurry. Life’s cool! Yeah?

So, now that I am my own boss I consider myself a very considerate one- allowing my self take extensions, more extensions and some more of it. I can not just delay the things I may not do it all. And, I can wrap it in some fancy, hard to pronounce & understand words and make you feel I am moving rocks behind the screen. The problem is I am not just fooling you, but myself without even knowing or realizing that I am procrastinating with my blog. You may know all the useful, time-saving tools and productivity hacks, but if you don’t take action you are doomed to fail.

Even if you don’t think you are procrastinating with your blog I would suggest you make your claim after reading this post. Why I need you to read this article is, you can’t kill your enemy if you don’t know if it exists at all.

Let’s get on to reality.

‘A goal without a plan is just a wish.’ If you lack experience, knowledge or money- fear not! None of these will ruin your business. You can always build experience, knowledge, and money. But, if you have the habit of procrastination, it will kill your business even before you start it.

Psychologists say procrastination is not just limited to delaying the task- people procrastinate when less value is associated with the task or the results are far from you or you are an impulsive person. So, you need to find out the 2Ws:

1- Ways you are procrastinating

2- What are the tasks that you are procrastinating

Let’s find our enemy and pin and pinch each of it out our way.

Bloggers procrastinate by Waiting for the Right Time (That Never Comes)

If you’re waiting for your subscriber list to grow before you start sending them emails you are the one! Wait, you’re not spared, I have more for you:

If you wait for more traffic before you launch your product or insert affiliate links, or

If you wait for the right occasion (Thanksgiving, Christmas) to giveaway your freebie, or

If you wait for more number of posts on your site before pitching for guest blogging or launching your blog

You are procrastinating!

It’s easy to hide behind things that aren’t in your direct control. Right? It allows you to wait and buy more time without feeling guilty. It’s an easy way to save your self-prestige by silently sliding from being unable to just be notable. The key difference between the two words is that the former emphasis is more on intrinsic incapabilities and the later on extrinsic.

How to Beat Procrastination

So stop bouncing the onus off your shoulders.

Here you need to take the charge. Get started with the zeros.

Launch your blog with one article. Send your welcome email to even ten subscribers you have in your list. Roll out your MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Don’t launch to win but to collect feedback and improve. Fail fast and grow faster. In the online world, it is cheap. It just costs you time.

Bloggers Procrastinate by Calling it a Writer’s Block

If you haven’t posted on your blog recently because you’re having a writer’s block then it’s an alarming situation!!! You have a big hole in your content strategy- you can see through from.

This happened with me in my last blog when I knew nothing of content strategy.

I had my content calendar in excel sheet with topics I thought my audience will enjoy reading. I would plan, plan, plan and suddenly one topic would put me on fire and I would write on it. Why I was not enough inspired to write on the rest of the topics? Because I was not able to see the immediate need for it. There was no goal behind each one of that.

How to Beat Procrastination

If you know your strategy well you’ll never procrastinate for this reason. Each piece you create needs to go out and fills a void in your content game. So you know exactly what topics you need to write and are never short of ideas.

Writer’s block does not exist if you have a sound strategy at the back.

It’s like a puzzle, you need a particular block at a specific place to complete the final picture.

Bloggers Procrastinate by Waiting Till the Perfection (There’s No Such Thing As Perfect)

Can you imagine crafting this piece of content took me 15 days? Yea it’s a detailed 3000 words article and I was juggling many other tasks, but 15? Now that I have started creating illustrations for my posts I have another reason to procrastinate. From correcting every grammatical mistake to now perfecting each stroke of my illustrations- I used to carry it too far.

How to Beat Procrastination

Don’t be a victim of analysis paralysis! You should know when to stop perfecting your craft. Be it the article or the image if it conveys your message your job is done. Assign set time limits for writing and other tasks. Let the good enough be good enough.

Bloggers Procrastinate by Getting Overwhelmed by Big Tasks

Do you have that book-draft, an incomplete course hidden deep in one of the folders? That’s me too! A couple of books that I planned to write and a half-completed course I wished to launch is still in the mothballs.

The villain here is not the mammoth size task, but you. No matter how deep you know your subject you become a bag of jangled nerves when it comes to coming to the light. You shrink yourself in, casting in the comfort of darkness again. The villain here is you. That you don’t trust your capabilities.

How to Beat Procrastination

If big tasks or commitments scares you like me break them up in small chunks. Roll out small products watch them getting accepted, lift your self-prestige and move forward with pride & confidence towards your bigger goals.

Bloggers Procrastinate while Learning

I have taken months of learning breaks. While learning new skills is the first thing I recommend but what I did wrong is taking breaks for learning. Learning should not come in way of doing. It should be a continuous process.

How to Beat Procrastination

Determine what to learn and how much of it: Don’t learn a skill if you don’t need it in the next six months. Else it will postpone your critical deliverables in the short run. Skills need the practice to master and practice needs time. Put daily/weekly time limits to your learning process and rest of the time do your job.

Wrapping It Up

These are the 5 ways I have been procrastinating with my blog (without even knowing it). I would love to hear from you now. Are you making any of these mistakes? Do share in comments.

This article was originally published at upthereach.com