1. After my wife gave birth, I’m staying at my in-laws’ house near KL. The environment is not suitable for blogging.
2. I travel 45 minutes to go to my office, which means I spent total of 1.5 hours per day on the road to go back and forth for work.
3. I spent more time with my baby
4. I watch television a lot

As a part time blogger, in my 24 hours, I saw 3 productive time and 6 non productive/not so productive time.


Productive time

Your jobs/study.

It is your most productive time. Job represents a big chunk of my 24 hours in a day. Including the time taken to get to work, it slices almost 11 hours of my time during weekdays. And if you work on shift, it is taking your time more than normal work hours since you have to get used to it and adjust your rest and sleep time along with the time change.

The most important point here is, don’t see your job as an obstacle in your blogging activities and at the same time, keep your blogging activity in a way that won’t affect your job. Your job is as important as your blog since you’re relying on the income from it the most to feed your family.

How to blog and at the same time keep your job performance on a high level. This one is from my experience. One thing that I notice is, don’t spend too much time on your meals, make it fast. Allocate some time to find ideas on what you’re gonna write later. Reading my RSS feed is my routine every morning before I start doing my office job. But I don’t read all of them. I start with news before moving to my favourite blogs.

Why must you start your blogging task early in the morning? This is the time when you’re most energetic and fresh. The most important thing is to have ideas on what you need to write. You’re not necessarily start writing your post in the office, but draft it properly, so that you can get a basic idea on how to continue writing about it later on. There are plenty of ideas on how to get blogging ideas on the net.

Your family, spouse and kids

Family comes first no matter what. This is the fact. Do not compromise your family for the sake of your blog, it’s not worth it. Unless you work from home, the only time being with your family is after your office hours. Being at home is 1 of the most wonderful moment in my life. The foundation of staying in happiness is by having your family to live in harmony and full of loving time spent together with them. This is also the foundation that will ensure the success of your career and your blog.

It’s up to you on how to manage and balance between your career, blog and family. Spend part of your time with your family before you start blogging. You can get ideas when you’re in the office.

Some tips to get blogging and at the same time be with your kids.

• Get them to sit beside you/or you sit beside them. This is suitable for those who has a lot of patience and does not care about the disturbance that might happen.

• Accompany them doing their activities or homework. While they’re focusing on their activity, move your focus to your work.

• Take your bath and meal early. It’ll freshen you up. Get them to sleep early, and as they’re sleeping you can continue blogging.

Read email & RSS feed content

Use the above time to complete this task at least partially. Normally, I don’t spend too much time on this task or when I have started writing. Furthermore, I don’t think that reading email needs as high concentration as when you’re writing.

How to get the time for this to be more productive

• Download your email (Yahoo,Gmail, Hotmail) to your notebook using email clients such as MS outlook. If you have a smart phone or PDA phone which has WIFI capability, download your email and read it whenever you’re free
• Subscribe all of your frequently read contents in your RSS reader. You can download your RSS contents to be read offline using applications such as Google Gear but it is limited to latest content .

Non productive times/Not so productive time

This list not reallly non productive times, it actually depends on how you fulfill this time. If you spent too much time or do nothing during this time slot, then it will fall under total non productive time

Traffic Jam/commute time

I’d have to say that amongst all, this is the most non productive time in your daily life. Whether you like it or not, you have to go through this everyday. But what do you get from traffic jam, instead of wasting your time and fuel? You can do something during these hours, even though it is not directly about your blogging activity.

How to turn this into your productive time? Before that, I’d have to tell you that I learn this from one of my friends who had lent me 1 MLM CD. I’m not a big fan of MLM, but I found that this CD audio is very useful. The audio suggests that we use this time to listen to whatever audio you have, what you’re interested the most, so in my case it must be something related to blogging or internet marketing. Keep listening to it repeatedly.

You need not necessarily absorb everything on 1 shot, but by listening to it repeatedly, you’re letting your subconscious mind to slowly catch up the important points. Ok, let’s say you listen to it in 1 week, if it takes 30 mins to reach your office, and you listen to it at least 10 times a week, it’d total up to around 300mins, which is around 5hours. Amazing right? You’re not letting your time fly away without doing nothing.

And if you’re commuting using public transport, get any MP3 player and get your Audio downloaded and ready to get them rolled on.

TV shows/entertainment
This is everyone’s favourite, and so do I. How many hours do you spend your time in front of your TV set or game console? 2-3 hours per day? Ok now, what do you get out of it? Happiness, feeling entertained, or sad perhaps. It is not wrong to have it, but cut it as short as possible. Would the feeling lasts long? And imagine now if your blog is successful? Which happiness is most preferred?

How to turn this into your productive time? Actually, you’d achieve 2 things in 1 action. You watch TV which will in turn will entertain yourself, at the same time accompanying your kids to enjoy the entertainment together or you can also have a little chat with them. At the same time, you can also do your daily lite blogging tasks such as reading your email or commentating. Reading emails and commenting does not need as deep focus as when you’re writing.

Meal time
Your meal time is part of how you get around with your kids and wife. This is also how you can get to socialize with your friends if you’re having meals outside or during office hours. This is not a big deal for me since my wife is a freelancer and when I get home, the dinner is ready. But how about those who are single or students?

Eat and getting full is not part of it, don’t forget to get more fruits and nutritional food of high fiber food. What you eat is important as well. Ok, I’m not gonna talk more about it since this is not a blog for food.

How to make your meal time your productive time?

• Fast food - Ok, but not good for your money, and health if taken so much often
• Cooking - Unless it is more than 1 person eating, this is a waste of time and money
• Take away - I think this is the best. Focus during your meal. You’ll normally take 15-20 minutes to finish your meal, but if you dine out, you’ll spend most of your meal time for something not meaningful

Shopping
How often do you shop? One 1 time, how long do you spend your time on that?I’d have to say that I shop at least 3 times in a month looking for groceries, clothes, books, accessories and etc. Let say your spend 3-4 hours, you have pent 12-16 hour per-month for shopping alone.

How to make your shopping more productive

• Buy in bulk and during sales
• Shop where you can get everything in one place such as hypermarket, shopping complex
• List down what you need to buy, so you won’t miss anything/overspend or waste your time looking what you need
• Shop online
• If you bring your spouse for shopping especially cloth or accessories, it could take hours before they finally decide what they want. Fill the time with more beneficial activities such as reading, or perhaps brainstorming the ideas for your blogging

Your social/personal life
Blogging doesn’t mean that you need sit in front of your computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week or 365 days a year. It is more than that. Gatherings, events and other such activities are as important as your posts. This is how you get network with fellow bloggers.

On the other hand, spending time on your personal life is one the most valuable time you’ll ever have. Perhaps it is more important than your blog. Growing your personal relationship parallel with your blog would be great too.

How to turn this activity to be your productive time

• Lepak in mamak stalls with your peers or colleagues is good, as long as it’s not too long till it’s considered a waste of time. You can decide on the length of time for it to be considered as wasting. The keys here is, you must know the limit and have a safe control mechanism
• While hanging out with you peers, why not share out what you’re doing after working hours, such as blogging. Attract them to get them join the program

Sleep
Sleep is as important as your meals, but do not exceed the amount needed. Usually adult need about 6 hours per-day to be considered that you have enough sleep. How to get most of you sleep?

• Learn how you can squeeze an hour out from your busy and tight schedule, and how to achieve that.
• Sleep on time
• Follow 7 sleeping habits of highly effective people

Weekend
Where probloggers might use the weekend with their family, for part time bloggers, this is the time you can use to explore the for ideas. Mind mapping is one wonderful technique to get your ideas elaborated further. Stay tune on blogjer’s future post on how to utilize your weekend for your blog

Time management

In overall, the most important part is time management, how do you manage your time and prioritize things accordingly