Scheduling And Organizing Your Blog

By Theliteraturelion @LiteratureLion
I know as much as any other blogger that organizing and scheduling your blog is an important task. I've been a blogger for two years now. It has not been a consecutive experience.
I'm notorious for taking breaks here and there. Sometimes for a week or two, sometimes up to five months. I just can't seem to find time to do what I need to do.
When I started blogging again this past fall, I knew that there were certain things that needed to change. First of all, I knew that I needed to become more organized with my work. I didn't have a set schedule like I do now, and I regret that very much. I did have a planner for quite some time where I would write my necessary information, but that didn't last very long.
Recently, I discovered Google Calendar. I love the ability to be able to color code things and the fact that I have it synced with an app on my phone called CalenderMob. It makes it easier for me to see what needs to be done and extra things I have to do in my to-do list.

The easiest way for me to stay organized is by having a structured schedule. As you can tell, I have certain things I do each week.
  • Sundays: Review
  • Mondays: Review
  • Tuesday: Top Ten Tuesday
  • Wednesday: Waiting on Wednesday
  • Thursday: Review
  • Friday: Discussion Post
  • Saturday: Stacking the Shelves
I feel that this works best for me. Most often, I like to take a weekend and schedule all the posts that I can do for the month. This means tackling all of my Top Ten Tuesday posts, Waiting on Wednesday posts, and any discussions that I can. Then there are my reviews. I read about three books in a week, so it's the perfect amount of reviews and memes. Usually I don't do anything on Saturday's and Sunday's at home, so those are the days where I can read the most and can schedule most of my blog posts.
When it comes to scheduling posts, I like to make drafts of posts that are works in progress.
For example, in the image above you can see that Prodigy is a draft. I read that earlier in the week and right now all it has are keywords and notes I have that I want to include in my review. 
Besides Blogger, I use many other forms of organization. I have a Google Drive account for my blogging things, and I like to create a lot of spreadsheets. 

First of all, I like to create a document at the beginning of each year that states what books I've all read. Those are the 2013/12/11 Reviews in the picture above. In that I keep information such as the book, author, publisher, date read, a check box if the review was posted, and if I emailed the publisher. I really like doing this because I have all that information in one place. 
Next is my email. I do get quite a few emails, and I like to keep them organized. I hate having things in my inbox when they are no longer in use. Generally every week I go through my email and take any archived messages and put them into folders. As you can see, I have quite a few folders. There's a folder for each type of conversation on there, or for any other mail that I want to keep. I always love the feeling of organizing my email and clearing out my inbox! 
I do have a lot of tips and tricks for organizing my blog. I feel like this makes blogging much easier and I rarely am rushing to get posts done.
If you have any tips for scheduling and organizing your blog, let me know!