Blogging fear: Deadlines

I asked for your biggest fears in blogging, and y’all came through.

This week’s fear: “My fear or challenge is meeting my own self-imposed deadlines.”

— Nate Crowell

The paperweight on my desk reminds me how to write. It reads: “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.”

It has never failed me.

But I am a creature of a different era, one who lived according to daily newspaper deadlines. You brainstorm, you interview, you ruminate, you procrastinate, you write, you panic, you rewrite, you edit, you cut, you proofread, you make deadline.

And then, you do it all over again. Repeat till dead (more appropriately, repeat till newspaper is dead).

Perhaps you are the super-organized type, a blogger who plans far ahead and arrives everywhere early.

We secretly hate you.

If you have self-imposed deadlines, you have recognized the importance of publishing on a routine basis on your site. But you may have difficulty following such a regimen for any number of reasons.

1. Poor time management. Some activities, vital and otherwise, interfere with your time for blogging. A blogger can compensate for this with another tradeoff, such as giving up time for sleep to finish a post.

We make time for what is important. Ultimately, blogging must be a priority to take up part of your schedule.

2. No risk/no reward. Many corporate bloggers miss deadlines because no one cares. Not them, not their colleagues or boss or customers. Whether they miss one post or a dozen, no one will be reprimanded or fired for skipping on the company blog.

Conversely, a salesperson may receive a hefty bonus for closing a big deal. Publishing a post that earns praise, awards or even leads may receive nothing but silence.

Either blogging is an integral part of a business’ goals, or it’s not. If a blogger stops blogging with no effect on sales, customer service, marketing or branding, why bother?

3. Poor resource management. A conscientious blogger can be derailed by many issues. At a newspaper, it wouldn’t matter if I turned in my story on time if the photographer lost the memory card with the images, or the computer system shut down, or a breaking story needed more space in tomorrow’s edition.

A corporate blog may need careful attention to available resources: people for art, editing, promotion and programming; money for research, licensing, freelancers and equipment; and time (see No. 1).

Dig deeper into how your blog posts come together — it ain’t by magic. If deadlines are set but not met, define the roadblocks and develop ways to go around or through them.

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Tell me about your biggest fear in blogging,
and I might answer it in a future post.

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More in our Blogging Fears series.