8 Downtime Occasions to Find Great Blog Ideas

Blogging is a great way to express your ideas and concepts. It’s also a dependable medium to educate, entertain, or train others. To do any of that, however, you’d need a continuous influx of ideas for creating blog posts. Most bloggers think that creating a website or a blog with a smorgasbord of content will do. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’d know that it’s not true.

Getting ideas to create riveting blog posts is one of the challenges all bloggers face. On top of that, an unimaginable amount of time goes down the drain during the day. So, here are a few ways you can use this downtime to generate blog ideas:

Reading with purpose

All writers invest in reading. Successful entrepreneurs make reading a habit. Reading books, magazines, websites, periodicals, and newspapers is the fastest way to wisdom.

If you are a blogger, you got to write. Writing is a form of output. Reading is the input you need to get a better output, especially writing. A good reading habit arms you with knowledge, increases your knowledge quotient, and introduces tons of new ideas for you to blog about. Reading, in fact, is the single biggest secret that most successful authors, bloggers, journalists, and business owners have in common.

The famous 10-15 minute breaks

It’s understandable that no matter what you do for a living, it’s a good practice to take breaks for every hour or so. Some hardworking people take breaks every two hours. No matter what, you’d take breaks and that’s a good habit. Now, there are ways you can make these 10-15 minute breaks count.

How about thinking of new blog topics while you are out taking these breaks? Most people tend to get on Facebook, chat away sweet nothings, or stare out into a vast nothingness. Why not think about a few blog ideas while you are out and about? You don’t have to try too hard since you are not operating on deadlines here.

So, since you are relaxed your mind is in a better position to think up ideas for new blog posts. A typical working day would have many such 10-15 minute breaks. So, how many ideas can you come up with?

Journeys can now be productive

Moving trains and buses are really not the kind of situations where you can get any serious work done. In fact, all that jostling isn’t even good for your eyes. So, what’s the next best thing you can do with hours to spare? Even the long waiting lines before airport check-in counters are good places to observe, reflect, think, and note down ideas as they happen. An unimaginable amount of time is lost waiting in queues, journeying from point A to B, on flights that have no Wi-Fi or Internet connectivity of any sort, and while waiting for transport. These are all good times to think of blog ideas.

Unproductive meetings

While this mostly applies to bloggers who still have a day job, getting productive during any one of those hundred meetings you have to attend even if you never have to share, contribute or present anything is one of the best time investments you can indulge in.

Meetings are notoriously unproductive and these are good times to sit down and scribble, jot down ideas as they occur or possibly even use the present situation to your advantage. Assuming each meeting lasts for an hour, you’d have loads of time all to yourself just to think about your future posts for your blog.

The dreaded commute

Unless you drive to work, you can use the commute time to do something productive. You could read which in turn churns ideas in your head. If you find that reading is cumbersome while commuting, you could just sit with Evernote on your smartphone or tablet and capture ideas as they happen. Alternatively, you could pick up a good old notepad and start coming up with ideas you can later turn into blog posts. Even the hardcore “work-at-home” types have to commute one time or the other so this applies to everyone except when you are driving yourself.

Connecting ideas from elsewhere

It so happens that we have a life apart from blogging. You could be in hundreds of situations each day and each of these situations could teach you a thing or two. There could also be a remote possibility that you could apply some of those lessons to blogging. It’s a great idea to get those lessons and pivot them over to blogging ideas. Further, each of these ideas will turn out to be unique perspectives on the niche you usually blog about since these are personal experiences extrapolated to the topics or niche that you blog about.

Feel good chronicles

In life, there are a lot of things you could be doing that you take immense pleasure in doing so. It could be those weekends you spend, the times you spend with your family, the fun you have with friends, and many more. Could any of those experiences have something worth sharing about? Can you draw from those experiences, good or bad? You could use these “feel good” chronicles or even “feel bad” experiences to come up with some incredible ideas to create blog posts. Think about it.

Traveling

They say traveling opens your mind, exposes you to new experiences, and puts you in uncomfortable situations often. Every new experience is worth expressing and learning from. Traveling shakes you off your comfort zone and helps you to learn, adapt, and improvise. Travel can either humble you or crush you. It won’t, however, kill you.

While traveling itself is a popular blogging niche, there are plenty of lessons gleaned from your personal experiences with travel that you could relate to your niche somehow. It could about specific experiences you’ve, stories you might want to share, or some instances that can relate to the main topic of discussion.

Everyone has downtime. It’s possible that we have such downtimes everyday of our life. It’s up to us to these pockets of time and to use it to our advantage. How do you use your downtime? How do you go about finding ideas for your blog posts? How ruthlessly calculative are you with your time?