All jobs have some things about them that you don’t like. Your primary response to this should be to shape your role in a way that minimizes these things. The reason is that the things you don’t like doing take time (and energy) away from doing things that lie within your strengths.

If you let this build up too much, it will render you ineffective. As Marcus Buckingham argues in his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, the most effective people over a long period of time identify the things they don’t like doing, and stop doing them.

But you can’t achieve a utopia where there is literally nothing you don’t like doing. So what do you do about those things?

I’ve found that the things that I don’t like doing interfere more with the things I’m good at if they are spread throughout the week. This makes it so that I’m frequently shifting gears between things I’m good at and things I’m not, making for a draining day.

So my solution is that I’ve now defined a day for everything that I don’t like doing. Whenever something comes my way in an email or from anywhere that is important for me to do and which I can’t eliminate, but it drains me, I put it in a bucket for a certain day. (I’m not going to say what day that is!) Then, it is off my mind. When that day comes, I plow through those things and get them off my plate.

This keeps the other days much more free to do the things that energize me, without having to switch gears so much. Yet I still know that the “not enjoyable, but must be done” things will still get done, since they have a day assigned.

In addition to making my other days more effective, I anticipate that this will have two other positive effects.

First, it gives me a gauge for knowing, for real, how much of this stuff there is. By saying “all the stuff that I don’t like doing has to fit into such and such day,” I have a systemic incentive to keep that stuff to a minimum (rather than merely an intention, which always ends up getting over-ridden). When you let those things be scattered over the whole week, it’s like not having a fuel gauge in your car. You never know how much fuel you are really using. This gives me a gauge, with the result that I can more effectively seek to minimize these things.

Second, I hypothesize that I will find out that I actually do like doing many of these things that I currently don’t like doing. It might be the case that the precise reason that I don’t like doing most of them is that they simply aren’t a good mix with the other tasks that I like to do. But if they were all grouped into a specific block of time, where I didn’t have to switch gears between these things and other things, I might find that I actually like them.

Or, perhaps better, I will get a much more accurate idea of what I really don’t like doing, so that I can be more effective at ultimately cutting more of those things out for good.

This is a guest post by Zach Nielsen of Take Your Vitamin Z (a blog which I highly recommend). Zach’s post gives a good “behind the scenes” view of blogging and how to be productive in it.

Some people have inquired about my method for blogging. How do I approach it? How much time does it take?  Do I make much money from it?  How does it all work?  Here is my response.

The number one catalyst for my blog is very simple: Google Reader. I subscribe to over a hundred and fifty different blogs via Google Reader and most of those posts form the content of my posts on Take Your Vitamin Z.  Google Reader makes my blogging way less time consuming than if I was bookmarking all those blog sites. If you read a lot of blogs and don’t use RSS yet, you are simply wasting a lot of time. The idea is not complicated. It’s just like checking your email, except for blogs. All your favorite blogs can be read on one internet page. Google Reader updates whenever a blog that I subscribe to updates. If I am going directly to one of the many blog sites that I like it may or may not have updated, but with Google Reader (or any other RSS feed provider) I have the freedom to only be notified when those blogs that I like update. This makes my blog reading much faster and efficient.

In terms of how I decide what to post, it’s pretty simple as well. I just look for things that I find to be interesting.  This is how my blog has been all along.  If I find it interesting then I’ll post it. This usually means that the topics include Christian theology, music, art, some sports, culture, adoption, abortion, leadership, short essays that I choose to write on various topics, and other random things that I find amusing.

It seems that there are other people out there who resonate with the same things that I do and find my blog worth reading, but it is also important to note that I have been blogging at least 5 days a week for almost four years in a row. Most people don’t understand that it times a huge commitment over a long period of time to have a blog that might be consistently read. Guys that know way more about blogging than I do always say that the key to a good blog is great content and consistency over a long period of time.

When I first started my blog I thought I would write long essays everyday that would be full of life changing wisdom. I found out after day two that day one’s post wasn’t all that life changing and the well was dry for day two. Thus, taking my cue from my college roommate, Justin Taylor, I mainly post things that other people have written. Those folks can usually say it better than I can anyway and I’ll bless way more people if my blog is more than just what stems from my own reflections. Also, I simply don’t have time to craft my own short essays everyday. Even if I did have that much to say, I wouldn’t be able to justify it in light of the fact that I have a wife, four kids, a busy church job, jazz gigs on the weekend, and am planting a church in Madison, WI in 2010.

I usually do most of my posting in the morning. Google Reader fills up during the night and in the morning there are usually 50-100 items for me to looks through. I can look through these very quickly and if I see something that is of interest I can copy the text, copy a photo, write some short interactions with it, etc. in a matter of minutes. On Blogger (my blogging platform) you can schedule what time your posts go live on the web so at times I’ll schedule four posts, an hour apart, but do it all at once. I often check Google Reader through the day but this usually only takes 1-10 minutes since there usually are fewer items to sort through.

I have started to make a bit of an income from blogging. It’s nothing that I could support my family with, but it is a nice extra bonus every month. This comes through two various streams of income, 1) Amazon.com, and 2) paying advertisers. The Amazon.com program is rather remarkable. All you have to do is click on any Amazon link that I provide anywhere on my site and then buy whatever you want (not necessarily the product that you first clicked on) and I’ll get a small commission. This extra income is a great way for us to save money for our church plant in Madison, WI, so if any of you out there would be willing to remember to click through my site when you buy on Amazon it would be a blessing for us. All you  have to do is go to my blog first and then click on an Amazon link in the right sidebar under “sponsors” or any Amazon link in my posts.

In my life, this whole blogging thing has taken on a bit of a life of it’s own, beyond what I ever thought it would, but I enjoy it quite a bit. If you are interested, I have posted some other reflections here on why I have a blog.

Here’s a post on how one person uses Evernote to manage just about everything. I use Evernote as well, but slightly differently; I’ll post on that down the road if I can. This article is a helpful overview of what you can do with Evernote.