(This is a guest post from blogger extraordinaire Erica Reitman, who does her hyperlocal blogging at F*cked in Park Slope and her design blogging at the aptly-named Design Blahg. She also serves as the Marketing Director at Squarespace. Erica can be reached via Twitter @effedparkslope or @designblahg.)
So, I took a vacation from my blogs for 2 weeks. This vacation didn’t coincide with a real vacation. I wasn’t sitting on a beach or hiking through a rain forest. In fact, I was mostly sitting on my couch, catching up on TV, meeting friends for dinner and on one particularly delicious night, going to bed at 9:30. Like 9:30 p.m., in bed, lights out. And yes: it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
A blog vacay doesn’t have to mean leaving town. If you’re anything like Erica, it can mean spending some QT catching up on your favorite reality TV, like SYTYCD. It’s YOUR blog vacay: do what you want!
I have two blogs now (FIPS and Design Blahg) and I typically post 2-3 times per day on FIPS and at least once a day on DB. I also have a Twitter account for each and a Facebook page for each. Oh, and a full time job. So needless to say, it takes a lot of friggin’ time to manage this all. Like A LOT. Now, no one held a gun to my head and said: YOU MUST WRITE TWO BLOGS OR ELSE, so I take full responsibility for this insanity. But it *is* insanity and I decided that I needed a mental break from it all, and so my blog vacay was born.
Logistically, it was slightly easier for me to organize the vacation as I’m lucky enough to have other writers on both blogs who help me out. My gameplan was to take the entire two weeks, save two Sunday eves where I had to recap a TV show.
Here’s how the first few days went down:
* day one: I caved and did a blog post
* day two: I took some cell phone pics and sent info on a post to my FIPS editor.
* day three: I came up with a new blog idea
SON. OF. A. B.
Ok, so things didn’t go *exactly* as planned. And it was waaaay harder than I thought it would be to just step off. But also, after the first few days, I did swing into a bit of a groove. And if I’m being really honest, there were even a couple of days toward the end that I didn’t even bother going to FIPS to see what stories were posted (or even IF any stories were posted… and, of course, they were). But it felt really nice to just take a step back and enjoy a different view of my life for a couple of weeks.
In the end, I really loved the time off. I think it was worthwhile for me to clear my head and feel like a normal person, without the pressures of “OMG WHAT AM I GONNA POST TOMORROW” swirling around in my head day and night. Yes it was slightly challenging getting my head back in the game after my vacation was up, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.
So I say bon voyage… take a blog vacay of your own and try it out.
(ED NOTE: To learn more about Erica’s secrets to blogging, check out the Mediabistro class she’ll be teaching this fall in NYC: Intro to Blogging.)
