I feel like a fraud because I’m about to share some super awesome work/life balance tips… and I’m the LAST person to call myself an expert in work life balance.
I actually think there is no such thing as work life balance.
As a freelancer, I hustle to run this business that I’m so very passionate about. That means working long hours and loving it. But even though I enjoy what I do, I also enjoy spending quality time with the humans that I love. These five WordPress tools seriously free up a lot of time for me so that I can step away from the computer!
1. iThemes sync
I happen to manage a lot of WordPress websites and that means multiple updates per week. Logging into each website’s WordPress Dashboard takes time which adds up the more site you manage. iThemes Sync ensures that all my websites are secure with up-to-date plugins, themes, and WordPress versions.
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2. Revive old posts
Social media engagement is vital for your brand, and getting my old content out there for folks to read (I feel) can be really helpful! Revive old posts sends my posts out to my Twitter + Facebook channels, automagically, at a schedule that I set. Brilliant!
3. Schedule posts for the future
Extra time is usually a luxury that small business owners don’t seem to have a lot of. Especially if you manage your own website. And social media sites. And blog. One of my favourite systems to boost my productivity is using an editorial calendar and WordPress’ “schedule” post tool.
It allows me to write posts when I have the time, creativity, inspiration, and/or energy to write and then, you guessed it, schedule that post for the future! Like this post. I wrote it ahead of time, then scheduled it to publish at 6:00am on Wednesday, April 15th 2015.
4. WordPress Editorial Calendar
The Editorial Calendar plugin can help you with all sorts of organisation. No more scrambling to figure out if you’ve scheduled a post for next week – it’s all available to you in a great visual calendar format AND it lives within WordPress (my favourite part of the plugin).
5. Backup buddy
Backing up your website on a regular basis saves you all sorts of time in an emergency. Having a plugin that automatically backs up your website is even better. I use and recommend BackupBuddy by iThemes which is so super awesome. You can create multiple schedules that are fully customizable to a frequency that works for you and your content publishing schedule. Best Practice? Backup your WordPress database as regularly as you write new content, and run a full backup weekly.
Back to you. What’s your favourite WordPress tool for bringing a wee bit more balance into your life? Let me know in the comments 🙂