Since I started writing about personal development, I always heard from other bloggers and friends that having a posting schedule is the best way to keep readers visiting your website. The idea is that if you regularly post 3 times per week always on the same days, people would know when to expect new posts and thus they’d return to your website regularly. I knew that this was not true based on my browsing habits, but I decided to give it a try anyway, so I published a posting schedule and did my best to stick with it.

After several weeks, it’s time to draw some conclusions. These conclusions will be helpful in order to understand important principles about productivity that apply to all aspects of life.

First of all, having a posting schedule means that you have to spend a fixed amount of time each day writing. That’s not a bad thing per se because I enjoy writing every day, but a schedule also implies having deadlines. In my case I had 5 deadlines per week, or at least that was the initial idea.

Given that I love writing it was not hard for me to come out with new post ideas each day, however I felt that if I didn’t have deadlines I would have covered certain topics more in depth.

The problem is that making a good post takes me between 4 and 8 hours, but I can’t afford to spend all that time every day, so I had to compress the time available to meet the deadlines.

Guess what happens when you do that? You limit your creativity but you also limit the value you create. In my case instead of making 1 or 2 very good posts per week, I was making 4 or 5 that were just good enough. And when you are on the internet, good enough means that you’re like everyone else.

Below is some real data that shows the effects of producing good enough or average work versus producing awesome work.

The previous graph shows feed reader stats.

One way to measure value in blogging is by looking at the number of people who subscribed to your rss feed. While that number might not be 100% accurate, it shows an important thing. Every spike on that chart is the result of a very good post that I’ve written here. Average posts don’t produce spikes.

Another way to measure value in blogging is by keeping track of the number of visitors that each post gets in a specific amount of time. The chart below shows the difference in traffic that I usually receive based on how many hours I spend writing that post. Again, this is true 95% of the times in my experience with more than 160 posts written at this time.

From the previous graph you can see that when I spend 1 hour working on a post, I’d usually receive 1000 visits to it. However, as I increment the time spent working on a post, the amount of visits it receives grows exponentially.

I don’t usually like to link value delivered with number of visits, but in this case it makes sense to do so. My stats show that when I spend between 1 hour and 2 hours writing a post, I can expect to receive only 1000 visitors, but if I spend 4 or 6 hours instead, I can expect between 15,000 to 60,000 visitors.

The important thing to note here is that I can’t just write four 1-hour posts and expect the same traffic as a unique 4-hour post would. The reason is that when I have plenty of time available for writing an article, I can do more research, focus on details and reread it many times. This can’t be done in only one hour of course.

I’m glad I did this experiment, but it’s now time for me to abandon my posting schedule and instead focus on creating only high quality posts. This means that I will only post one or two times per week, maybe three. I think this is a win-win situation for everybody.

How much do you value your time?

So what can we learn from this experience? The first thing that comes to mind is that if you value your time, it’s better to spend some extra hours and create something more remarkable rather than rush for fast results, because those results will be ten times worth it.

Spending one hour each day producing average work means wasting your time compared to spending 4 hours every 3 days and producing awesome work.

This is true not only for blogging of course, for example a great programmer can be ten times more productive than a mediocre one, and produce fifty times more results.

A good question would be how to measure the value you produce. It could be money or something else, it doesn’t really matter. A better question instead is how you can produce more value. It’s only when you produce great results that you see what kind value is created, so don’t focus on money, focus on the value and money will follow.

So how do you create more value? The answer will vary depending on what you do, but in general it involves two steps: do less, do it well.

  • Do less. Doing less means that you can’t please everybody. In my case I couldn’t afford to publish one post each day because it was too time consuming. Even google when first launched differentiated itself by showing only a blank page with two buttons.
  • Do it well. Doing less is not an excuses for poor execution. Choose carefully what you’re going to do, but do it as best as you can. Pay attention to details and use your passion. Returning to our google example, a blank page with two buttons is only half of the story, the other half is providing great search results, which is exactly what its users want.

A company who encourages its employees to work on a few things very well is a company who will build great things. The most respectable companies only hire the top people in their niche, and together they create 80% of results in the entire industry (personal estimation). Similarly, an individual who understands the power of using their time wisely can often exceed the results of bigger companies, where most employers are on a payroll and are only waiting for friday evening to come.

The effects of doing less but doing it well are also present in other activities like sport or study, not only in business, and they can (and should) be practiced in every situation.

I want to conclude this post with a challenge. It’s easy to agree (or disagree) with something just read, but the real benefits only come when you practice what you learned. Find an area of your work, hobby or anything else and think about those times when you got big results on it. How were you spending your time in those occasions? Were you just rushing or were you paying attention to details? Make a list and look for some patterns. Resolve to do more of what you find in order to produce great results. What will happen if you make it your default behavior?