At the start of October 2017, I was examining my schedule for the remainder of the year. What did I want to accomplish before 2018?
There are always way too many options when thinking about this. I could do any of a hundred things and feasibly be happy with the results. But what to focus on?
One goal was to start scheduling my steemit posts ahead of time. Up until October, I had been mostly doing posts on the same day, or even within the same hour, of posting them. It was easy to do it, I just thought of a post idea, wrote it, and then posted it all at once.
Then one night, I went to hang out with my friends. We drank some beers and were chatting, not doing anything in particular. Just a relaxing hang. Then I realized: Shit, I hadn’t written anything for steem that night!
It became clear to me that I could not write everything on the spot. Having a few days of “buffer” material would allow me to take a night off without missing a post.
It’s Surprisingly Hard to Get Ahead of Schedule
The first challenge was organization. How do I keep track of a continuously moving and evolving schedule?
There are entire books written on this subject. Once upon a time I had a whole desk drawer full of folders for different days of the week/month/year… that was kinda cool. But in the end I think the simplest possible method is the best, so I settled on a single text document with a schedule in it.
The next challenge was the problem of instant feedback… I was used to motivating myself by saying “Now I will write something and post it - who knows, maybe it’ll be a successful post.”
It’s harder to motivate myself when I say: “Ok, let’s write up a great post and then forget about it for a few days!” lol, there’s no immediate motivation. That took a while to get past, to be honest.
Lowering Expectations
At first I planned to be a week ahead of schedule with my posts. Then that failed over and over, so I settled for…. one day, lol. One day ahead of schedule.
That took practice but I did get it. Pretty soon I was loving being one day ahead, so if I missed a night, I wouldn’t miss a post. As long as I could sit in front of my laptop for two minutes to copy + paste my already-written post, I could keep my blog active that night.
Over time, the skill of being one day ahead helped me push it further. I got to be two days ahead and that felt even better. Now I’m three days ahead of schedule and it feels so comfortable.
The lesson here was simple: To accomplish a big habit shift, I had to start in the smallest possible way. I’m stoked to be on a posting schedule now, it is much more organized and manageable.
Do you schedule your steem posts ahead of time? How do you keep track of it?
