What's the perfect job? How about a job where you are your own boss, you set your own hours, work right from home, never have to deal with unreasonable deadlines and get to do something you love doing? Sound good? Well that's the job description of a blogger. That, however, is the not the whole story! There are very, very few bloggers who have nothing else to do but work on their blog and even fewer who have a blog that provides a decent source of income so blogging is, for most, a second or even a third "job."

There are two basic types of bloggers, the casual blogger and the serious blogger.

The casual blogger may have a basically well balanced life and a blog that is primarily a hobby. The casual blogger will start writing a post, work at it for awhile and then stop to get some other things done until he or she feels like writing again. If a finished post doesn't get many comments, that's OK; the post expressed just what the casual blogger wanted to say and its out there if anyone is interested.

The serious blogger's situation is quite different from the casual blogger's. The serious blogger has a blog that he or she considers to be a job -- a job that may be competing with other important elements of life such as a primary job, a family, a social life and adequate rest. The serious blogger is committed (almost to the point of an obsession) to maintaining his or her blog and feels it is an essential element of daily life. The serious blogger feels dejected if any post sits on the blog for twenty-four hours or so without generating a comment or if the blog's "hit counter" does not register a certain number of visitors every day. That kind of commitment to blogging may take a big hunk of time out of the day and can easily create some serious conflicts between blogging and the rest of life -- to avoid this, the serious blogger needs to be organized and efficient.

Time management for the serious blogger! Anyone who feels that the day is too short needs to understand and implement the basic principle of time management: setting priorities. Some things are obviously more important than other things but some important things may be left undone unless you are controlling your schedule and not having random events control you. You need to set priorities and live by them.

Make a priority list! To begin setting priorities, make a list of everything you need to get done -- everything including things you've committed to doing, things you want to do, things you know you should do and things that you really don't want to do but are on your mind. Be honest and put everything on the list -- take a couple hours or more to put it together if you need that much time, it will be time well spent because you are about to get organized.

Important: You will be using and modifying this list every day so create the list using some program that will allow you to move list items around, add items, remove items and save the list. Just notepad or your word processing program will do nicely but there are other more specialized programs available -- they may even be free, check out: Tucows at tucows. com.

Categorize! Now carefully consider each item on the list and put each one into one of the following five categories.

Must get it done today

Must get it done this week

Nice to do and might be beneficial

Nice to do but not really necessary

Unnecessary

Now you have a decent priority list. Start every day with this list and every time you become aware of a new task add it in a proper place to the proper category. As the "must do" items are accomplished and moved off the list, some of the nice-to-do items may be moved up, but only if their priorities can honestly be changed.

Too many must-do things! If the list of items in the two "Must get it done . . . " categories is overwhelming, reconsider each item's importance and re-prioritize if you can, if not select the items that you really don't have to do yourself, things like fix-it projects, business phone calls, business letters, editing and proofreading jobs, etc. -- some of these things may be able to be done just as well by someone else. Find a friend, family member, co-worker or a freelancer to do it for you.