finding the time: i can't vs i won't

Erin's inspiration board

Dallas and I had a pretty interesting conversation yesterday about finding the time to fit everything we want to do into our lives, and the excuses we make for not doing the things we never get around to. Like, in my case, working out. Essentially it was about the fact that when you really want something, you find the time, and most of the time "I can't" is really just another way of saying "I won't".

I'm not sure that I agree with that entirely (mostly because I think that sometimes we all need to give ourselves a break for not being able to take on everything), but I do to a certain extent. It comes down to priorities really, and making sure that your goals are always top of mind. It's about figuring out HOW to make the most important things all fit, even if you have to adjust your game plan a bit to do it.

This morning's feature on the Everygirl (man I love that site) gave me a swift kick in the butt about that very same concept.

Erin from Elements of Style - one of the most popular design blogs out there - is featured, and she talks a lot about what you have to do to be a successful blogger, and how starting her blog was the catalyst to her entire career. One of the main things she stresses is that she has written every weekday for five years, and that it took more than a year of that for her to get any serious traffic.

The fake working is pretty adorable

The thing is, this isn't news to me. I know that posting every day is one of the biggest keys to blog success (I work in web communications for Christ's sake), but I still haven't been able to get myself to actually do it. The main reason is that I have a full time job, and it's hard to fit it in, but that doesn't mean I can't. What it does mean is that I need to figure out how.

So I'm going to try to tweak my process, because right now my posts are taking me an incredibly long time to put together. There's research and writing, but mostly it's picture editing in order to make things fit the dimensions of my layout. I'm going to try to spend less time fretting about the perfection of the look of each post and more time actually posting. And I'm going to set time aside every day to work on it. If it matters you make it happen, right?

Maybe I'd get more done if I worked somewhere like this ...

I'm a little too realistic to think that this will all happen overnight, but I'm hopeful that I'll at least increase my weekly posts from two to three, and slowly keep building from there. Baby steps.

And hey, I can use it as another excuse for why I "can't" work out...