Scheduling My Steem Posts a Few Days In Advance Has Been Super Useful
At the start of October 2017, I was examining my schedule for the remainder of the year. What did I want to accomplish before 2018?
There are always way too many options when thinking about this. I could do any of a hundred things and feasibly be happy with the results. But what to focus on?
One goal was to start scheduling my steemit posts ahead of time. Up until October, I had been mostly doing posts on the same day, or even within the same hour, of posting them. It was easy to do it, I just thought of a post idea, wrote it, and then posted it all at once.
Then one night, I went to hang out with my friends. We drank some beers and were chatting, not doing anything in particular. Just a relaxing hang. Then I realized: Shit, I hadn’t written anything for steem that night!
It became clear to me that I could not write everything on the spot. Having a few days of “buffer” material would allow me to take a night off without missing a post.
It’s Surprisingly Hard to Get Ahead of Schedule
The first challenge was organization. How do I keep track of a continuously moving and evolving schedule?
There are entire books written on this subject. Once upon a time I had a whole desk drawer full of folders for different days of the week/month/year… that was kinda cool. But in the end I think the simplest possible method is the best, so I settled on a single text document with a schedule in it.
The next challenge was the problem of instant feedback… I was used to motivating myself by saying “Now I will write something and post it - who knows, maybe it’ll be a successful post.”
It’s harder to motivate myself when I say: “Ok, let’s write up a great post and then forget about it for a few days!” lol, there’s no immediate motivation. That took a while to get past, to be honest.
Lowering Expectations
At first I planned to be a week ahead of schedule with my posts. Then that failed over and over, so I settled for…. one day, lol. One day ahead of schedule.
That took practice but I did get it. Pretty soon I was loving being one day ahead, so if I missed a night, I wouldn’t miss a post. As long as I could sit in front of my laptop for two minutes to copy + paste my already-written post, I could keep my blog active that night.
Over time, the skill of being one day ahead helped me push it further. I got to be two days ahead and that felt even better. Now I’m three days ahead of schedule and it feels so comfortable.
The lesson here was simple: To accomplish a big habit shift, I had to start in the smallest possible way. I’m stoked to be on a posting schedule now, it is much more organized and manageable.
Do you schedule your steem posts ahead of time? How do you keep track of it?
As a fellow organizational geek, I will have to try this too. I do certain weekly posts and this would be a fabulous time management thing.
You might love it! This is a real game changer.
Not only is scheduling good to keep the post count regular, it's also really useful if you know when your most powerful followers are online to help get your posts noticed. I have, in the past, written posts in the evening and scheduled them for the following morning.
Just out of interest, have you used a third party too to schedule the posts? I use
https://streemian.com/profile/scheduledposts
I've tested out Streemian, that's actually something I was going to do in the next few days lol
The curation trails are also good on there.
Lols
scheduling?
Hmmm, haven't really thought of that
But would definitely be a good strategy for maintaining a healthy blog.
But I think scheduling is for people who gets power supply steadily not like where I live, where we see power supply twice in a week and that's the only time we get to use gadgets.
So in a nut shell
I don't schedule post
I just create content and post once my device is powered up 😂
Lol that sounds like it must be a lot more frustrating.
Yes, I also want to be ahead of schedule - especially coming up towards Christmas time @heymattsokol
Yes that's a good idea. The steemit app gives you the option to schedule posts but it doesn't work and posts it immediately anyway lol.
I have written posts in the past and then saved it out onto a note which works great especially if you have photos. To clarify- I wrote a complete post with photis, copied and pasted to a nite and when I pasted it back the photo links all still worked.
I'm sure you know that though.
Anyway, all the best with your endeavors in staying ahead!
I've been dropping a daily collor challenge photo via @steepshot. Then there is at least some movement even if I'm not up to writing anything.
Cheers
I wish the steemit app had good scheduling in it! Streemian works but it looks so old fashioned that I often doubt it lol
Hey! good luck with this.
I am still writing my post on the same day. As I still having a hard time of actually creating content per day let alone 2 all at once.
I am the same with the instant feedback though... Most of my work only has very few viewers & voters (Mostly Original works bot on it though hahah) and I check it up every few hours. If I ever created more than 1 post a day I will probably publish them both on the same time :p
Ah yea it's normal to have really low viewership and votes at first... can be hard to stay motivated through all that but if you keep at it, you can get somewhere. For me it was most helpful to meet other people by joining Discord and Slack channels with other steemians.
Hey! Thanks ill try that some time :p
@heymattsokol, this was very timely as I'm currently setting mine and my family's schedules for the upcoming year. Thanks for the insight. 🙂
You are welcome mama bear good luck w/ the 2018 schedule
very good plan
best of luck for that dear
Great ideas to keep one step ahead @heymattsokol