Review: Blogging by Buckets — Does It Work?

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Back in December, there were seven days — a full week — on which I posted nothing here at the blog. That wasn’t the end of the world, but for someone who tries to post something insightful (or at least entertaining) daily, it certainly wasn’t ideal.

In January, there were only two days — the equivalent of a single weekend — on which I posted nothing.

What changed?

Only one real thing: I took the advice of Mack Collier, creator of the weekly Twitter chat, Blogchat, on creating topic buckets to increase your productivity.

I wrote about it here, but in a nutshell, it involves creating a bucket for each of the topics you want to write about, then filling the buckets with new posts as you get the ideas. If you’re a niche blogger who writes, for example, about homemaking, you might have a bucket called “Saving at the Store,” another called “Quick Household Fixes” and another called “Favorite Recipes.” You can be as organized as you wish, but the beauty is that you can be as unorganized as you wish.

If you want to dedicate each bucket to a specific day of the week, you can. Or, you can just post whatever you come up with next whenever you want.

The buckets, at the very least, help you come up with the next great idea for the next great post topic by topic.

I decided to try to make the most use of the bucket idea, assigning various buckets to specific days of the week. Blogging/Social Media/Internet gets one bucket and I post something from that bucket every Monday. Grammar gets the Tuesday slot. You can see the entire layout here.

It has worked for me because it has taken a great deal of pressure off of the need to come up with something to write about. If, for example, I’m on a grammar tear, I can write two or three grammar-related posts and toss them into that bucket. All of a sudden, I find myself with three or four weeks’ worth of grammar content. So that next Tuesday is already handled. I can then look around and find something on another bucket topic that I have something to say about. For every bucket I place something new into, no matter which order I actually write those posts in, I’m one step closer to having the week written.

The obvious question, after reading that, might be, “What if there’s some big news on a topic you’ve already written about?”

I’m glad you asked.

For me, it’s simple: you schedule the newer, more topical post first, and reschedule the other, less topical post on a subsequent week. If both posts that week are so topical that they need to run, then schedule them both the same day. But if one is more “evergreen” and can wait a week or more, then you have another week covered on that particular topic.

The post that’ll run tomorrow as my weekly grammar topic came from something I heard a news anchor say this past weekend. It took the place of a different post I’d planned, which is now scheduled for a Tuesday in March. If I hadn’t told you, when that day rolled around, you’d have had no idea that the post was written more than a month earlier.

That week, I’ll have more time to focus on posts I’ll run on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.

Even when it’s a week in which I only get one post written a full week or more in advance, it’s one less post I’d need to write that week. And sometimes, having that one extra day is enough to really give your productivity a boost: I still write a post nearly every day, but I don’t start the day feeling like I just have to finish that day’s post first thing that morning.

And any plan that takes a little pressure off is worth exploring in my book.

Does it work? Definitely. It has made a big difference in terms of productivity and focus for me. I suspect it would for you, too, no matter how many topics you cover on your own blog.

Your Turn:
Sufficiently convinced? Do you think blogging via topic buckets is an attractive idea you’d like to try?

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