How to make 168 hours work for your web content

If there’s one thing we all have in common (apart from death and taxes!) is a 168-hour week.  In other words, we each have a total of 168 hours available to us every week.

How we choose to spend those 168 hours depends on many things.

Once you’ve done all the essentials, such as sleeping and eating, it’s very easy to squander what’s left of your 168 hours – or allow them to be ‘swallowed up’ by the day job, life in general, a new all-consuming hobby, television, social media, socialising or ‘just stuff’.

But it is possible to set time aside to get important tasks done.

Create a 168-hour web content plan

One way to keep your website content at – or near the top of your list of priorities each week is to make sure you set aside at least a fraction of your 168 hours for web content updates.

For example, if you publish a new blog post once a week, work out how long it takes you to complete that one blog post – and this includes research, writing and finding an image.

If you have more than one weekly blog or a daily blog, perform the same calculations for each one, adding in an extra 15-20 minutes of buffer time for each post.

So, if it takes you 40 minutes to complete one blog post, you should set aside a total of one hour times however many blog posts you are publishing.

If you would like to approach your content creation with even more precision, or would like to give yourself a timed challenge, you could break down the task and allocate timings to each part of the task, as follows – using a blog post as an example:

• idea and rough planning – 5 minutes
• writing and editing – 25 minutes
• sourcing an image – 5 minutes
• publishing on your website/blog – 5 minutes
• buffer time – 15-20 minutes

Why you need buffer time when creating web content

Your buffer time gives you a little extra time insurance should you need it – e.g. to reboot a temperamental computer, do some research, or create some thinking time.

I have, in recent weeks, been making use of my blog post buffer time to put together ideas for future blog posts.

I have found that the task of writing a blog post fires up my imagination and supplies me with a flow of ideas.  By making a note of these ideas during my buffer time, I am building up a growing pool of ideas that I can dip into when I write my next blog post.

Why not give the 168-hour content plan a test run?  It’s a tried and tested way to make sure your web content gets the attention it needs each week.

Post written by DEBBIE THOMAS on 22 June 2011.