Embarrassing Habits Behind This Bumbling Bloggers Ways

No matter how I've been blogging or where it takes me, I think I'll always be surprised when people say I'm an 'inspiration' or 'one of their go-to bloggers' because believe it or not, despite how organised I look, or how clever I seem, I have some extremely WEIRD blogging habits. I love being organised, and creating lists, and I love sharing all my experiences and the tools that make those experiences even better, but I'm not without my strange and alienating twitches. Of course, in normal Amanda fashion, I wanted to share these with you.

1 | I'm very rarely focused on one task

I shared what a typical blog-filled day looks like for me, and within that, I talked about all the tasks I spend my day doing, but in truth, it's very unlikely that they'd be spaced out or set in a particular order. In reality, it's a bit like a traditional cake recipe; the new recipes say to do each step individually, but back in the day, you threw it all together, and that's pretty much what I do with all my tasks.

Some tasks will have more of my focus than others. The perfect example being creating this post; I'm typing up this post with my notes beside me, but every now and again, I'll tweak and update Buffer to keep it full of social media updates, and when inspiration takes hold, I might just jump ship and get flashy with photography. Hell, when lunchtime rolls around, I'll bounce between checking out my feeds and hanging around on Twitter and Instagram, and that's because I don't have a set focus.

Surely that's really not productive? Like, how do you get anything done?

Rewards my friend, they work.

Let's say I started this post at 12 in the afternoon. I have a small plan with the points I wanted to make, but beside that, it's all a bit 'anything goes'. I'll keep writing the post until it's finished, and only when it's finished can I either a) spend some quality time with my games console, b) watch some really rubbish daytime TV or c) help myself to very naughty piece of chocolate cake in the fridge.

This way, I still have the freedom to do, quite frankly, whatever the hell I want in terms of blogging tasks, but the reward is only available at the end, which makes me more likely to get cracking with content quicker, because cake doesn't stay in the fridge forever.

2 | I'm either creative for blogging, or photography

I'm almost certain I can't be the only creative who struggles balancing different creative avenues. You see, the problem is, when I'm feeling creative for content and I suddenly decide I want to take photography, one of them always ends on the 'not how I'd imagined, but it'll do' box. Most days, I wake up and I just KNOW which creative avenue I'll be taking, if any.

Some days I wake up, like today, and I know I'll be churning out an entire blog post, complete with links and graphics and the whole shebang, and other days, zilch. Some of those other days turn out to be photography days, which usually end with my spending the afternoon viewing, deleting, editing and uploading over 500+ images, and only loving around 15 of them. The other days are just total flops.

How To Prepare For Photography PhotoShoots (+ 50 Prop Ideas!)
My Quick and Easy 5-Step Process to Editing Photos (With Picmonkey!)

Is there a reason for this crazy habit? You know, I'm not sure, but it certainly brings out the best in me no matter how it works. Writing and photography I find are very different forms of creativity - one involves the power of words to create a variety of emotions or bestow knowledge upon others, or just to rant, while the other is beautiful in an entirely different way. The story is the same, but the method is not, and that's probably why trying to mix to the two usually ends in both tasks being okay, rather than awesome.

3 | Some post ideas stay ideas for weeks, or months

I actually shared this habit a bit with my subscribers a few months ago, and even explored it a little when I shared why you should doubting yourself and write anyway, but some of my post ideas suck. They sound AWESOME when they first come to me, and between all the other content, all the other tutorials and advice and recommendations and tool talk, they end up feeling.. flat, like filler content, and I hate them.

That's why I usually let my post idea stew before exploring them.

Back in the day, I used to create a draft and add to the draft as I went along, adding ideas, taking them away and leaving them in my Blogger collection until the day I either went 'YES, time to write you baby' or I threw it in the trash. As good as that used to be, it was a serious motivation killer seeing it there when I was blogging, reminding me of my failures.

Now though, with Evernote, I can do exactly that but store it somewhere else where I can only access it and see it when I'm looking for it, which means my motivation stays up there while I let the post decide what it's doing. Some post ideas can be there for days until I explore them, expand them and share them, while others can be sitting, maturing, waiting for months before I think they're ready.

How I Organise and Manage My Blog With Evernote

It's a strange habit, and can sometimes result in me completely forgetting the direction of the post, or what I wanted the post to achieve, which usually results in writing a completely different post, but sometimes they turn out absolutely brilliantly, like my post on using Evernote. That post was over 5 months in the making after I mentioned it in another post last year, and in that time it changed a lot along the way, including finding it's way into the trash bin quite a few times. Just goes to show that sometimes you just have to give those posts time, or yourself, it's always one or the other.

4 | I like to write my posts in HTML

I realise this is one of the most crazy of my habits, especially for none-tech people, but it's almost a comfort to me now. It took me a while to get myself around the world of coding and tech-speak, but once I knew the basics and had enough of layout issues in Blogger, I bit the bullet and checked out the HTML aspect. Wow, was I horrified.

There were unclassified divs almost EVERYWHERE, word formatting from when I'd copied and pasted things from elsewhere, alignments absolutely everywhere, and in the end I just had to stop it from ever happening again. Now I write almost all my content in the HTML editor, adding in the alignments, the classes and ids as I go along, and getting the layout of my post how I want it to be has never been easier. It's not a blogging habit for everyone, but it works for me.

5 | I save ALMOST all my images as PNG

There are some general rules when it comes to saving your images, no matter what they're for, and Ashley covers them really well when talked about reducing file sizes, but I just have a habit of saving most of my images as PNG, even when I could save them as JPG.

I save my Instagram images as PNG.
I save my blog graphics as PNG.
I save my blog photography as PNG.
If it can be saved as a PNG, it is.

These are all some pretty bad or unusual habits, but we're not all perfect pineapples in this world, and we should feel like we need to be. Doing what works for you, whether it's a little crazy or not is all in your system. If it works, keep at it, but you don't need to do what everyone else does, or feel ashamed if you don't. Your blogging habits and your blogging journey is your own, and it's based on what you achieve, not the numbers you receive, so shouldn't we embrace our unusual and crazy habits as part of us? I think so.

What's your worst or most usual blogging habit?