Earl Moore posts about the difficulty of finding time to blog amid life's larger responsibilities- like the job, the family, the outdoors and having fun. Richard Querin adds his thoughts as well. It's a challenge for sure. While I don't always do it well, here's my approach to blogging, which shares much in common with Earl and Richard.

Early in the morning, before work, I read my RSS feeds (via Bloglines), Techmeme, my personalized My Yahoo page and my personalized Netvibes page. If I see something I want to write about, I'll either begin a draft post and save it to finish later or, if I'm in a hurry, bookmark it via Del.icio.us.

My ability to read or post from my office depends entirely on my schedule for that day. If I'm in the office, I can generally finish and publish a quick post over lunch. Because I often have lunch meetings, I try to have several posts finished and in the queue to be published, so all I have to do is take a few seconds to publish them during the day. At any time I generally have 5-6 completed or nearly completed posts sitting in my queue for this purpose (a series, like my Web 2.0 Wars, is very good for stacking your queue). Writing a bunch of posts in advance sounds like a pain, but since I do a lot of my writing late at night on weekends (after the kids go to bed), it happens naturally.

If I'm in the office all day, I try to read my RSS feeds over lunch and then again near the end of the day. One thing I regularly do throughout the day is tag things, again using Del.icio.us, that I might either respond to that night or include in the next day's morning reading post. At night before I go to bed, I do a draft of the next day's morning reading post so all I have to do in the morning is add any new items that I come across during my morning read.

Late Friday night, after the kids go to bed, is generally devoted to doing my weekly podcast. I keep a mental list during the week of the songs I want to play. The tech talk is generally ad libbed, based on whatever I'm writing or thinking about at the time.

It's not a perfect system, and sometimes I get woefully behind. But the more I write, the easier it is to keep things moving along.

I really like Richard's notebook (the non-computer kind) idea. I may give something like that a try.

How do you manage your blogging?

Tags: blogs, blog building