keeping my sanity in 2013

It's easy to keep doing what you always do without giving much thought to what is and isn't working well simply because it's what you know. While we were on vacation in San Antonio last month, I took time to organize my thoughts about a lot of things that I do and don't want to do in both my personal and professional life for 2013. I've started to make the following changes that I hope will help keep me more productive and less stressed, particularly when it comes to blogging. The bottom line is that blogging has to be fun for me to stick with it, and I want to keep it that way.

• Quitting the EBW team. As many of you know by now, I left the EBW or Etsy Beadweavers team at the end of 2012. It is really sad to leave an Etsy team primarily because it isn't fun anymore, but that's what happened. It felt really good to cut the ties from all of that drama and unpleasantness.
• Quitting the Friday Feature and Sunday Treasury Round Up blog link ups. The link ups were a...fun experiment for 2012. Not really. I'm insanely jealous of bloggers who are able to launch those type of link up parties successfully. I don't take it personally that it didn't work very well for me and think my time will be better spent letting it go than trying to build and promote it every week.
• Pushing Treasury Round Up back to every other week. Those of you who write treasury thanks posts know how time consuming they are to put together. Getting rid of the link up and having an extra week to publish each post will free up a lot of time and generally take off a lot of pressure, especially when weekends get crazy.
• Not stressing about filling in extra Saturday Link List days. Typically this isn't an issue because the recipes, resources, and tutorials take up 3 lists each month, and I can fill in the fourth week with a special holiday post. However, every once in a while there isn't a holiday coming up, and I don't feel like writing something else. I'm not going to be stress about making those extra link lists come together anymore.
• Not pushing five weekday blog posts each week when it just isn't coming together. I've gotten into a pretty good routine with weekly and monthly topics and features that doesn't make it too hard to fill five weekdays. However, we all know how some weeks it's a push to actually get the content online in a timely manner. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, and the world isn't going to end.
• Re-evaluating social media. This is one of the few areas that I'm a little clueless about how to attack for 2013. The bottom line is that when push comes to shove and I'm crunched for time, writing and Etsy/craft fair business has to take precedence over other online tasks. I'm hoping that keeping that resolve will allow me to let go of social media time more often.

What modifications are you making for your blogging and/or business routine in 2013?

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