Is time spent blogging avoiding “real work”?

When you’re your own boss one of the interesting things that happens is that you get to decide what is “work” and what is “goofing off”. When someone else is giving you tasks to accomplish this is largely determined for you but unless you work for the pointy haired boss if you’re in the tech industry you likely have some degree of freedom in how you spend the passing moments while your at your job.

The question then becomes - especially for the self-employed - how do you classify blogging time - and by that I mean time spent both reading and writing blogs.

Certainly if your blog is your primary work product then time spent writing blog entries has to be considered working. But really very few of us - even those who seek to monetize their blogs - have a blog as their primary work product. By that I mean that guys like John Chow and Shoemoney - while they do make good money from their blogs really make most of the income from running other sites.

And what of time spent reading blogs? The blogging world is highly inbred and bloggers spend a lot of time talking about what other bloggers are saying. Bloggers will get ideas about things to discuss and important happenings from reading other blogs.

For me, I spend a lot of my time wonder what it is I want to do next. After being tied up in one particular site and niche for years I’ve largely lost my feel for what the state of the Internet is and the state of the Internet has changed drastically since 2000. For me I view reading blogs and writing here as absolutely “doing work”. I admit that not all the blogs I read are work related and I certainly enjoy both the reading and the writing but to me at least it is still part of my job.

It’s good to enjoy your job.