How Long Does It Take You To Write An Entry?
Published on September 25, 2005 at 4:40 PM EST
Last updated on October 9, 2006 at 12:01 AM EST
In the Discussions category.
Are you the last one to leave the dinner table each evening?
I’m really curious—how long does it take you to write an entry to post on your site? I know this varies quite a bit based on the content of a site. I’m sure that if a site is about daily life (with several posts per day) it takes only minutes to write a new post; if a site is full of tutorials or how-to instruction it takes quite a bit longer to write a new post.
I probably spend at least 15 minutes on any entry. Brief movie and TV reviews, for example, don’t take much typing time but once I add in proofreading, rewriting a sentence or two for clarity, and add some keywords and a category or two it all adds up. For a long entry, like Organizing Photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements, I will spend time over several days writing, editing and adding screenshots. All told, I probably spend 3-5 hours on longer entries like that! I’m a slow writer, I know.
And then we get into the photography, such as I’m doing now for another entry (Guyot Designs Gription Mark II Review). I’m probably going to spend a good hour setting up my home studio—adjusting lighting, modifying the background and getting everything just how I want—before I even take the photos, which might add another 30 minutes. Depending upon how many photos an entry has (and whether or not I set up the “studio” for them), that means even a short 15 minute entry can easily grow to two hours or more of my time to create it.
How long does it take you to write an entry? Is there one aspect you spend the most time on? Have you found any shortcuts to help a new post come together quicker?
Post-save addition: from start to finish, this entry took me 18 minutes to publish.
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When it comes to photos, almost all of mine are outdoor shots. My goal is to always have me camera with me. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes I just go out and shoot. In a couple of hours I can easily take over 100 photos. I can get enough photos from this type of session that I can post maybe a dozen.
I don’t have a lot of patience and I don’t worry about perfection. I just tweak the photo’s to get a look a like and then post them with a 25 to 50 word description of what the photo is about and whether or not I like how it came out. Most photo’s I can make presentable in about 15 minutes.
As far as original writing, that can take some time. I try to keep my posts short (When it comes to photos, almost all of mine are outdoor shots. My goal is to always have me camera with me. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes I just go out and shoot. In a couple of hours I can easily take over 100 photos. I can get enough photos from this type of session that I can post maybe a dozen.
I don’t have a lot of patience and I don’t worry about perfection. I just tweak the photo’s to get a look a like and then post them with a 25 to 50 word description of what the photo is about and whether or not I like how it came out. Most photo’s I can make presentable in about 15 minutes.
As far as original writing, that can take some time. I try to keep my posts short (<150 words) as I think there is a better chance people will read them all the way through. That can still take 15 to 30 minutes.
I’ve thought about using dictation software, but I don’t know if I could think through the same way.
I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to packaging my blog entries. So although I tend to type very fast, my entries typically take around half an hour; the short ones around 15 minutes; and the long ones 5–8 hours. Then there’s the Spanish translation I sometimes update. (My Spanish is still at the point where I have to look up every few words in the dictionary.)
I write a journal that’s more like a newspaper column than a traditional blog (that is, 2,000 words a day, and only one entry per day). That takes me maybe an hour, an hour and a half to write and edit. But then I actually post it from my mobile device (a Palm Treo), because I have neither home nor work internet access on a desktop, so that takes another 20 or 25 minutes altogether, between posting it and then logging into my MT account and adding categories, keywords, etc.
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