How I find the time to blog? (or: Doing more with the same amount of time)

It took 182 hours to write all of CK's content for November, which does not count writing content for Patreon, time spent on social media posts to promote CK, or time spent setting up and playing the streaming concerts.

That equals a 42.5 hour work week of blogging, every week, which is nearly twice as much time as I currently have available to blog.

##

If you look back at a month in 2001 - say, March - you will see that I blogged a lot. A LOT. Sometimes multiple times a day.

It was easy to do - I was in college heading out of my first breakup and into my first internship. Putting a priority on sending missives into the internet ether wasn’t hard. Also, my average post was less than 130 words long!

Fast-forward 13 years. In 2014, the increasing popularity of Crushing Comics fundamentally changed the relationship of my free time to CK. It used to be if I had a spare hour in the day, I would bolt out a medium-lengthed post talking about what I was crushing on. Suddenly, an hour was a chance to do more research or link more collections in a comics guide that would drive page views and have a longer shelf-life.

When I was working full time I had just 24 hours of a 168 work week to focus on things other than sleep, start-up, and raising a small human. That 24 hours had to encompass things like rehearsals, chores, and errands in addition to blogging. That would leave only a few hours a week for CK.

Now, I am a full-time stay-at-home parent, which takes up about as many waking hours as working at a start-up! The difference is that all of the chores and errands are baked into my time with the toddler. Plus, I don’t have any low-efficiency time spent commuting.

As a result, I have that same 24 hours a week of time free, but it’s explicitly to work on creative pursuits. That’s at least 3x as much free time as I had to launch the 90+ comic pages currently on CK.

I've had those extra 24 hours a week of time since I first tackled my full-time parenting challenge, but I didn’t make that my focus. I’ve worked for six months on being as good a parent as I can be and making my child’s days incredibly memorable.

It’s no coincidence that my Patreon campaign has launched in my seventh month at home. As with any new job, it took six months of full-time parenting to feel like I’ve got the hang of it. 

##

If I only have 24 hours of slack time each week, how did I create 182 hours of content in one month?

The answer is simple: I didn't. I broke ground on content for Patreon on October 8, and started writing posts for CK on October 12. However, that head start only lasted through the first third of the month's content (and only a fifth of the time, since I was writing the shorter/easier posts).

If we count my cumulative writing time since October 12, I was effectively working 25.5 hour work weeks on blogging (which doesn't count an additional 5.5hrs a week I spent writing the CK posts I posted in October, or Patreon et al). 

In the period of November where I no longer had a head start, I was actually writing for 57 hours a week. That's comparable to the amount of time I was putting in while working full-time at a start-up.

Here is how I more than doubled an extra 24 hours a week into 57 hours a week for the past three weeks. 

• I did not rehearse with either of my bands (savings: 3hrs/wk)
• I called in Mother of Krisis for total of a day and a half of toddler support, and while EV was gone I wrote for every waking hour without pause. (savings: 8hrs/wk)
• I wrote through every single nap EV took (unless I also napped to be able to pull an all-nighter), which isn't part of my normal 24hrs-of-time equation. (savings: 6hrs/wk)
• E and I cancelled our TV/movie time and "no screen nights" of hanging out together. We pretty much haven't seen each other for more than a minute or two other than while EV has been awake. (savings: 6hrs/wk)
• I wrote through most of the day on Monday, much to EV's annoyance. (savings: 3hrs/wk)
• And, finally, for the final ten days of the sprint I've written until at least 1:30am every night - later if I had a nap (whereas my 24-hrs-of-time assumes I won't write past midnight). (savings: 8-10hrs/wk)

All of that comes to almost exactly 57 hours a week.

For anyone who has ever worked in project management, you know that's called "crashing the schedule" - basically, pulling out every possible stop you can to squeeze more efficiency from your project plan.

That is not something I can do every month. I don't even think I could make it another week, to be honest. It's been physically and mentally taxing.

##

I don't reveal all of this to make you pity my sacrifices or marvel at my willpower. The month was taxing, but it was my choice and it also constitutes one of my proudest achievements in life to date. 

That's a fair trade for some lost sleep. 

Instead, I'm sharing these details because:

(a) "data or it didn't happen," as we used to say at my start-up, and

 (b) it proves that I really could produce this sort of Crushing Krisis if it was actually my full-time job.

I've said all along that the goal of this campaign isn't to replace having a job, and that remains 100% true. But, I also thought it would be disingenuous to have goals (and rewards) through the $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 mark without conceptualizing how I would achieve them.  What if 500 readers showed up on day 1 with $2 each?!

Every time I felt exhausted, my new mantra (in addition to my typical "What Would Madonna Do?") was "Gail Simone managed a beauty salon and wrote every night until she made it ." And then I would blink my eyes a few times and keep writing.

Will CK ever have another month like November? Maybe not, but my analytics tell me that I don't necessarily need one - after I reach a rate of daily posts, adding more posts doesn't move the needle much on daily visits (though I'll reap more long tail rewards from SEO).

However, just like past special events like Blogathon, National Blog Posting Month, and National Novel Writing month, my participation was never about being showered with attention while it was happening. It was about testing myself and creating a body of work along the way.

I'm so happy to have made the time for that, and that you joined me for the ride.

I now return you to your regularly-scheduled Crushing Krisis ;)