Staying On Track: Blog Calendar

Ever since I started setting out to blog every day I've struggled with keeping track of what I'm posting and when. Back in the days of my first A to Z Challenge it was simple, I had a memo document on my phone with the days of the week listed down the side and the things I was going to blog about next to each one.

Then I started setting regular days for certain types of posts and things got a little bit more messy. I tried using apps on my phone but I just couldn't organise myself properly with them. I needed to have it all on one page, not in a variety of different lists.

And so I created The Word Document. It became so massive and unwieldy that it deserves the capital letters! It might have worked better if each new week went above the previous one in the chart, but I didn't have the foresight to do that when I created it.

It was a chart with the days of the week across the top, then the date in each box and underneath that the blog posts I was planning to write. Italics meant not yet written, underlined meant it was still needing revisions, strikethroughs meant it should have been one post but it had been changed to another.

And it ran to a nine pages (landscape format), starting in April and going down to December. So each time I wanted to look at my current blog posts I'd have to scroll through all the others. It worked well enough, I could see between two and three weeks at a time, I could see what I'd done in the past, I could plan several weeks ahead.

But it was a bit rubbish.

So during the Christmas break I set about doing a redesign. And then I made a spreadsheet and I'm so proud of it I'm going to show it off here:

How the schedule looked on January 1st.

I'm quite pleased with how it looks. For starters, it's not boring black and white like the old one. I've copied it each month into a new Sheet so I can flick between different months and continue with the schedule I've created for myself. And most importantly I can see the whole month at a glance.

As you can see I've already set up a complicated little way of keeping track of which posts I've written (coloured boxes mean a post has been written, greyed out means all posts for that day are written and scheduled). I've also got notes about things I'd like to write about (like a post about what I got up to in Wales upon my return).

And it's nice and easy to make changes to. I like to keep a record of what I've blogged about, so this time next year I can fire up a brand new spreadsheet, but then refer back to this one to see if there are any blog posts I'd like to repeat.

Do you use a calendar or any specialist software to plan and organise your blog posts?