I have a friend, let’s call her Erin, who called me in tears because she had umpteen million things that she had to build on her blog that needed to be done, according to her, RIGHT NOW or she was going to fail as a business. She was so overwhelmed and anxious that she became stuck and stressed. Let me set the record straight, you cannot fail as a business in only one week and your blog can limp along nicely if needed for a little while without the world coming to an end.
The reason why is this: Your site is made up of parts, not wholes.
A car, for instance, can continue functioning even if the air conditioner goes bad, its oil is low, a tail light is out, a window is cracked or there is a slow leak in the tire. It will hold for a couple of days or you can patch it until you can get it to the shop for a permanent fix. These small parts help make up the whole of the car, and as long as the parts are maintained, then you won’t have to worry much about breaking down on the side of the road.
So your blog works the same way. It’s made up of parts as well – like the Social Media Part, the Blog Subscriber Part, the Site Hosting Part, the Plugins Part, the Site Analytics Part, the Branding Part and oh, I could go on and on but I think you get the picture. And of course each of those parts have inner-working parts as well. For example, the Blog Subscriber Part contains the Opt-In Email Part and the Newsletter Part. There are a lot of moving parts within a blog but none of them are going to break your online business if they are not available for a couple of days or even weeks. That means you have time to do all of the work you need to do on your blog.
So how did this way of looking at things help Erin?
- Her task list became smaller. She created her list based on working on only one part at a time. This gave her focus and lifted the feeling of being overwhelmed and as a result, she was no longer stuck in one place.
- The feeling of failure went away as she was able to complete a part and release it on her blog. Feeling successful, even just a little bit, can be a very potent motivator in accomplishing more.
- She was able to prioritize her work assuring that the most critical Parts were in place first. For example, was it more important to build the Social Media Part of her blog first or the Foundation Content Part? Well, what good is Social Media if you have nothing to show on your blog?
Have you ever felt overwhelmed or stuck while building out your blog? Yeah, me too believe it or not. Just remember that you can get rid of those feelings by concentrating on the parts of a blog and not the whole.
So when you are creating your task list:
- Break up the work that needs to be done on your blog into Parts.
- Prioritize the Parts to help you decide which one to work on first
- Pick one Part to work on and create your task list for that Part
- Build out the Part and release it into the wild
- Do a little jig before you go back to step 3 and repeat