Tips for Nocturnal bloggers to Supercharge their Workflow

I think you might be hearing these words “Nocturnal Blogger” for the first time. If you are a student of life sciences you might have guessed on what I am referring to. Animals like bats, cockroaches, lions, etc usually sleep during the day and are active during nights such animals are referred to as Nocturnal animals. I just used this term “nocturnal” to refer the active state of an animal during night hours. Most of the bloggers especially home makers who blog are mostly awake during nights, as it is the most peaceful and comfortable time where we have less distraction.

Whenever I thought of writing an article during the day from morning 9 A.M to evening 9 P.M I usually have many distractions. My parents some times call me for some work and I have to abruptly end my writing. Sometimes I just sit to write a killer article and I am saturated with ideas on when to keep them in my Word Pad and then suddenly my friends start to come.
They’ll come and ask
“Are you busy?”
With a sigh inside my heart and a smile outside my face I have to say
“Hey nothing to worry just come in”
They spend about an hour or two telling all sorts of happenings and after they leave all the ideas which first flowed like a river will now become dry like a desert. I run out of the points what I have originally thought to write. So I switched my blogging schedule to some late hours in the night and early hours in the morning.

Are you also facing similar situations and thought of blogging in the late hours?
Are you a nocturnal blogger too?

Then here are few tips and suggestions to be followed in order to balance your workflow or to maintain the same productivity as you have during the morning hours.

Read: Shocking Sleep Deprivation Effects You Need to Know

Keep your lights ON:

The most important part as I start off my tips is keeping the lights ON. Mostly parents or elderly people or people who live in our house don’t allow us to keep the lights ON after the clock hits 11:00. But I personally have observed that when we use our computer in the night our eyes are strained too much rather than they do during morning. I tried using my computer by keeping my lights ON and I was able to observe a change. I could work an hour extra if I kept the lights of my room ON.

If you keep your lights off and if the display of the monitor is brighter, then your eyes will be strained and they become dry very soon. So make sure you lower your monitor’s brightness and try to use a small light in the room so that you would not strain your eyes. If your eyes start paining or you feel any sort of burning sensation its better you switch off your PC and go to bed. If you keep looking monitor for 5 hours continuously in the dark and as you finish your work and are off to sleep you could observe that you would not get sleep immediately and your eyes feel illuminated(you feel the monitor light for few minutes) even though you close your eyes. So lower your monitors brightness during night hours.

Always sit in a proper posture:

In the night hours we feel bit sleepy and just to take a little nap we slide a bit in our chair and rest. But the fact is that if you sit in a wrong position you could face lot of problems. Maintaining a proper body posture is a must and if you use your keyboard with a bad posture then you might suffer RSI (Repetitive strain injury). You should see that height of your chair is such that your arms should form a right angle when you use your computer. Also see that you keep a distance of 50 cm from the computer screen.

Read: Proper body posture to sit in front of Computer

Avoid drinking too much tea:

This is the tip followed by many students before their exams to keep themselves awake and study the whole night. Similarly as a blogger if you have lot of pending work which should be cleared or finished off by the next day then you need to stay awake whole night and for this drinking tea does keep you bit active. Drinking tea now and then is ok but if you develop this habit of drinking daily and that too in a surplus quantity can be hazardous. Recently an article was published in yahoo news stating a condition of a woman who has been drinking lot of tea.

Read: Too Much Tea Causes Unusual Bone Disease

Avoid eating Junk foods:

Hey you are not watching a movie to eat pop corn and drink some coke. You need to completely avoid eating junk foods like pizzas, burgers, soft drinks and any sort of oil foods during nights. It seems crazy to hear but some people do have the habit of eating while they surf net during night. You could well grow some extra pounds which would definitely have a negative impact on your health. Jane Sheeba of ProbloggingSuccess has clearly stated about the adverse effects of eating junk foods during nights in one of her posts in her health related blog. I have collected few words from the article and given a link below to read what she has said.

If you don’t have any walking or exercising space in your daily schedule, you are prone to put up more weight. Junk food is also a major source of fat adding component in your diet.

Late night snacks should be avoided as the body metabolism will not be much active during late hours of the day. If you can avoid taking food two to three hours before retiring to sleep, you will not add weight.

Collected from: How To Lose Weight Naturally: 5 Effective Ways

Keep off from your designing work:

Are you a freelance designer or a template designer or a graphic designer then its better you keep all kinds of designing works for the next morning. I too use to design templates during nights and I used to strain my eyes and waste a lot of time when it is in the night. But when I design in the morning I would do the same amount of work within half of the time I take to do it in the night. If you have the knowledge of CSS and play with your template designs then try for yourself. At nights our body always tends to relax and if we want it to work and that too for creative works like template designing or graphic designing then you are giving it an extra burden. Sometimes you might mess up using some wrong colors and spoil your design completely.

Have an organized schedule:

If you are sitting for 5 hours in the night it is better to have an organized schedule. As soon as you finish your dinner go for a small walk it not only helps you health wise but you can also brainstorm for your next post or you can organize the schedule for that particular night. And don’t make it a habit to work every night sacrificing your sleep. If you try to change the circadian rhythm then definitely you are reducing your life span.

Let me explain this for clear understanding I have collected a small excerpt from Britannica about circadian rhythm.

Circadian rhythm is the cyclical 24-hour period of human biological activity.Within the circadian (24-hour) cycle, a person usually sleeps approximately 8 hours and is awake 16 hours. During the wakeful hours, mental and physical functions are most active and tissue cell growth increases. During sleep, voluntary muscle activities nearly disappear and there is a decrease in metabolic rate, respiration, heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. The activity of the digestive system increases during the resting period, but that of the urinary system decreases.

So if you did not understand anything from the above passage let me say in simple words that you need to take approximately 8 hours of sleep and that is mandatory. I also read an article in Rahul Kuntala’s blog LearnBlog tips that sleeping 6.5 hours to 7.5 hours increases the productivity and life span too. I have linked the article below on how Rahul schedules his work plan below. Give it a sure try you would definitely learn something regarding organizing your schedule.

Read: How I Work 8 Hours/Day Online Without Getting Distracted

So plan your 5 hour schedule by keeping some 10 min gap after every hour. Plan one or two hours for writing article for your blog, half an hour for responding to your mails and comments usually it won’t take long for newbie’s, half an hour to promote your articles in social networking sites like twitter, Facebook, G+ etc, remaining time for reading your friends blogs, commenting in their articles and reading some blogs to gain knowledge for writing your next posts. Have a schedule like this and it will definitely help you rather than spending whole 5 hours in Facebook chatting and playing Farmville.

Conclusion: What Nocturnal Bloggers need:

So I want to conclude the above topic by giving a gist or summary of the entire 1300+ words discussed above. In order to be more productive and supercharge your workflow during night hours you need to organize a proper schedule and work for only two such nights that too not more that 4 or 5 hours and sleep well during other days. If you are free only during night hours then better plan a one hour schedule and strictly follow it. One day for writing article, one day for interacting in comments and promoting your articles in social networks, one day in reading and brainstorming for the next post. Keep this as your continuous schedule and supercharge your workflow…

Only thing you need to keep in your mind is to keep your health safe.
Aren’t these tips handy?
What do you have to say? I am waiting for your comments…