(reading time: 4 minutes)    [en ESpañol]

Almost a month ago my twins were born, so it is no coincidence a new post has taken almost that long to arrive since the last one. You may know how this is, lots of visitors wanting to meet the new babies, a young daughter demanding the care and attention she had before “dis babies” that “don’t leave” -in her words- arrived, and of course the never ending work responsibilities. With the family extension the little time gained by waking up at 5:30 am to exercise is just not there anymore, and if there is such a thing as free time, I want to replaced it by –the now luxury of- sleeping. Clearly blogging is far under in the list of priorities -around the 2985 place-, the hard truth is that there is not enough time to do most of the first items of that list that is driven primarily by real survival needs. Anyhow I really enjoyed writing the previous blog posts, so I secretly push upward the blogging on my list -to about the 98th place- in order to use some available time slots when my wife and daughter sleep at my turn for “the night with the kids” -basically the every-other-night I get to feed, burp and change the dippers of the twins the whole night-.

So here I am, at 2am, with about 2 hours –if I´m lucky- before one of the twins ask for milk or a dipper change- and I want to use the time to answer a question I got by mail from one of my friends:  “How are you going to blog with 2 babies, 1 small kid, a wife and a full time job?”.  The issue is not trivial, as blogging is basically my motivational hobby -low priority if compare with daily needs at home and work- so writing at late hours, when for some misterious reason I get the energy for it if the right idea triggers my mind, is the only hope for this blog in this sleepless times. To really make this possible I found I had to use the following productivity tactics:

• Once I have an issue or idea dancing in my head and wanting to get out to the public, I make a list of 2 to 6  aspects that need to be reflected in the article -don´t wait until later, do that bullet point list right there, in a napking if necessary- and I mark the most important ones –the ones that really should be there to give the reader (you) value with the piece-.
• I set a time limit for writing the article and its sub-parts. I have borrowed this simple technique from my project management work where I need to write long report that could take –literally- forever if a limit is not set. For this post I have defined a 2 hour limit:  40 minutes for the first draft, 40 for editing and final piece (may sound like a lot, but if not if you -like me- are not a good writer-, 20 minutes to get an image from my own photo folders and tweak it to make it work for the post, and finally 20 to stick the article and photo into the blog and publish it. I may not be able to keep this timing perfectly but setting the limit does place some constructive pressure on me, and help me avoid the typical procrastinating activities like surfing the net or whatever other activity I could easily find to ‘get busy’ without doing anything really productive.
• Then I start the process and put an effort to focus on it. But with babies you can’t have strict plans, so I am prepare for the distractions I´ll get and I am ready to retake the task wherever I left it when they get back to sleep.

That’s it, clear and simple, but it shows that planning does have a big impact if you act after it (if it didn’t, this post would not be here). I have to stop now as my 40 minutes of editing the draft are over and one ofmy twins is starting to cry out for the milk bottle and a dipper change, anyone wants to give a hand?. Its mazing how fast time goes and how much text I had to edit out from the first 40 minutes draft to make this post clear and straight to the point. Thank you for reading, see you on the next post.