My friend Matthew has been trying to write a blog post a day and has been having trouble with it. I think that every writer has this at some point. They day to day of life (kids, laundry, clients/job) just gets in the way of what we want to do.

If you're thinking that this doesn't happen to you, good job but I think you're lying.

While Matthew has a plan of scheduling out the posts he wants to write then sticking to it, I tackled the issue a different way.

Setting my first hour aside

My solution is to be intentional about the first hour of my day. Currently I sit down and write 1000 words on a new book about the business of freelancing. Then if I have extra time I pull up MarsEdit or Byword and start working on a blog post idea.

Most of the time that first hour of my day is spent in email or just jumping around in Twitter and App.net which is to say doing nothing really useful. Instead of that time being wasted I'm intentional about it and set my own priorities before my inbox can do that for me.

Setting aside that hour to do work I'm really loving gets my day going the right way. I end up being way more productive on client work for the rest of the day because I have the right spring in my step already.

photo credit: bogenfreund via photopin cc