Why Have I Been M.I.A.?

When I first started this blog, I promised myself that I will post regularly, if not daily. Unfortunately, I had absolutely zero time to post here this week and I didn’t want to ramble out a post at 3 a.m. because I do not trust my sleepy self to produce coherent sentences. (It’s actually 3:00 a.m. right now, so I apologize for any gibberish you might read in advance). And I just forgot what I was going to write about…

Oh! I remember now… So the reason I was M.I.A. for the past week is my other blog and personal commitments. I have been working on a post for that blog for 2 weeks – seriously – it took me 2 weeks to actually publish it. When I first thought about starting a blog, I never considered that it will be THAT time consuming, not that I am complaining, but I just wasn’t mentally prepared. I have been reading about other bloggers and their process for providing content to the public, just to figure out if there is a better way to accomplish a decent post with less time. Some bloggers say that it takes them an hour or two each day to come up, write up and edit the post before they hit the “publish” button. Not me. I probably spend 1 hour just editing and tweaking the final look of the post before I let anyone else see it. I will share the stages of my process here; perhaps someone has an idea on how I can shorten it?

Step 1.

Scribble in a notebook topics and ideas.

Step 2.

Begin to write by hand and when possible, re-type and complete the actual text for the post.

Step 3.

Shoot pictures relevant to the content or pick out pictures from the thousands I already have on my portable hard-drive.

Step 4.

Photoshop the chosen pictures into perfection and edit them to fit into the blog’s theme. This is the most time consuming part. Depends on the topic, but 20 pictures can take me up to 5 hours of some serious re-touching. I am not slow with Photoshop, I just like things to be perfect and that is very time consuming.

Step 5.

Put everything together in WordPress. Again, this takes me forever and god-forbid I have a genius idea to “animate” the post, so I end up spending hours figuring out how to HTML something in that post. Keep in mind that I have no clue about HTML and everything is a trial and error process.

Step 6.

Final touches – featured image, excerpt, description, keywords, categories and so on. Then I make sure that everything looks good on the front end of the site and I finally hit “publish”.

Step 7.

I go back re-read the post, and then I fix any errors I might have found. Once I am satisfied I share the post everywhere I possibly can – forums, g+ communities and social networks.

At this point I have spent about 10-15 hours on a regular post. If I am doing a “how to” post with pictures, then forget it – we are talking about 48+ hours per post. You might think this is crazy, but with a slight case of OCD and perfectionism, I absolutely have to make the posts perfect to the best of my abilities and that takes time. The interesting part is  that I get so involved in the process that I often forget to eat and sleep, when I finally get up of the chair, my legs are asleep and frozen in one position (not a pleasant few minutes).

That is why I haven’t posted anything here lately – I was doing one of those 48+ hour posts which turned into a 2 week project. I don’t even know if that post will receive any hits or feedback, but my goal is to “help” someone or at least make someone’s life easier just by a little bit through sharing information or experience I have had myself with whatever.

What is your process for creating a post? Does it take you as long as me or have you found a better way of accomplishing your blogging goals?