How long does it take to write a blog post? Time your next one

30 September 2026 · 6 min read

There is no single answer, because a quick opinion piece and a researched guide are different jobs, and the figures people quote online rarely match anyone’s own pace. The useful answer is yours: time your next post from the first search to the moment it goes live, split it into stages, and you will know what to budget for the one after.

Why your guess is probably off

Ask someone how long their last post took and they will usually name the drafting time, because drafting is the part that feels like writing. The rest gets forgotten:

Research: reading sources, checking a fact, finding the example you half remember.
Outlining: deciding the order before you write, or after, when the first draft turns out to be in the wrong order.
Drafting: the part everyone counts.
Editing: cutting, rewriting the opening, reading it aloud.
Images: screenshots, a header image, cropping, alt text.
Publishing: pasting into your blog’s editor, fixing the formatting it broke, the title, the description, the links.
Sharing: the post about the post.

Several of those happen in short bursts spread over days, which is exactly the kind of time memory rounds down. A post that “took an afternoon” often took an afternoon plus pieces of three other days.

What to measure, and what to skip

You do not need a stopwatch per stage. You need three things:

Total hours on the post, from first research to published.
A rough split between research, writing and publishing, because those are the parts you can change.
The length and type of the post, so the number means something next time. Write down the word count and whether it was a quick take, a how-to or a researched piece.

Skip anything finer. Nobody writes better for knowing the editing took forty-one minutes instead of forty.

Recording the Mac side without a timer

Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by name only, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set: the top five apps with the time on each, the rest as MISC, and a day total. There is nothing to start or stop, and it needs no macOS permissions to work.

For a blog post, the receipt tends to show two big lines: your writing app and your browser. The writing app line is mostly drafting and editing. The browser line is research plus publishing, and on its own it tells you little.

That is where itemized browsing helps. Switch on “Itemize websites” in Settings, and browser time in the supported browsers prints as the sites you used, each on its own line, competing with your apps for the top five. Your blog’s admin site becomes its own line, which is roughly your publishing time. Reference sites and search become lines of their own, which is roughly your research. Punchcard keeps only the site name, never the full address, the page title or anything on the page.

A few details worth knowing:

Safari time stays one line. Itemizing works in several browsers but not Safari, because Safari’s scripting cannot tell a Private window from a normal one. If you research in Safari, the split stays coarse. Why website time tracking skips Safari, and what to use instead explains the reasoning.
Private windows are never read. Time in a private or incognito window stays on the browser’s own line.
Short visits stay put. Sites under a minute stay on the browser’s line, so the day total never changes when you switch itemizing on.

Tracking never expires and the CSV export works without a license. The first two printed receipts are free; printing after that is a $9 one-time license.

The honest gap: the post is not your only work

Punchcard has no projects or tags. If you write the post on a day that also includes client work and email, the writing app line is the post only if you use that app for nothing else. Two simple ways around it:

Give the post its own sessions. Write in blocks where the post is the only thing on screen, and jot the start and end time on a sticky note. The receipt tells you what those blocks were made of.
Use the CSV. Export it from Punchcard and you get one row per session: start, end, app, seconds, and the site when itemizing is on. Filter to the hours you know you spent on the post and add up the seconds.

Thinking time on a walk, or an outline scribbled on paper, does not reach any Mac record. Add it by hand if it was real work; leave it out if it was the kind of thinking you would have done anyway.

Reading the number and planning the next post

Once the post is live, write one line in a note: the date, the type of post, the word count, total hours, and the rough split. After three or four posts a pattern shows up, and it is usually one of these:

Research is the biggest share. Keep a running file of sources and ideas between posts, so each post starts partway in.
Publishing takes longer than expected. Formatting, images and fixing what the editor broke add up. A saved template for your usual post layout cuts most of it.
Editing is small or missing. That might be fine, or it might be why the posts read like drafts.
The totals vary wildly by type. Good to know. Plan quick takes and researched guides as different jobs, not as one average.

If you write on a schedule, the Sunday week roll shows the whole week’s writing in one place, which is the easiest way to check that a weekly post is not quietly taking two days. How long a newsletter issue really takes to write each week covers the same approach for a regular issue.

If you are paid to write posts for clients, divide the fee by the total hours. That is your real hourly rate for the post, and it is worth knowing before you quote the next one.

Questions

Does Punchcard see what I write? No. It records app names, plus site names if you switch itemizing on. It never records window titles, document names, keystrokes or screen contents, so a draft stays private.

Can it tell research from procrastination? Only by site name. If the research site and the distraction site are different sites, they print as different lines. What you were reading on each one is never recorded.

What if I write on two Macs? Each Mac keeps its own record in a local file, since there is no account or cloud to merge them. Add the two totals together, or combine the two CSV exports. One license covers two Macs.