I’ve worked hard to try and refine my content creation process over the last couple of years to try and maximise my efficiency in this area. The aim I have is to try and harness the different types of task involved in creating content and work out how to best manage all this to make the most of the different types of energy and focus required for each task. So, here is an overview of how I manage my content creation process.
Part 1 – Idea Generation
The content creation process begins with generating ideas. This happens in 3 ways. Firstly, like today, ideas will come to me as I work, walk and go about my life. Any ideas like this get captured, either into Todoist or into my pocket notebook. I will process them later in to the content management system I use.
The second way is that a couple of times each week I have a 10-15 minute brainstorming session. I open up a blank note in UpNote and make a list of ideas for content. This includes videos, podcasts, blog posts and my newsletter. Once the time is up, I copy and paste the list into my ‘potential ideas’ area.
The last one is a bit more focussed. If I have an idea for a series or mini-series, then I will plan out the different episodes of it. This would be the structure and logical progression of the series. Again, this would all happen in a new note in UpNote and then copied across.
Generally speaking, I will go through the ideas list and allocate a topic (productivity, theology, book review etc) and/or a planned medium (blog, YouTube etc).
For completeness here, I should also note that sometimes I will repurpose content already published in one form, for use in another form. So a blog post gets reworked for my podcast for example.
Part 2 – Content Management System
Although some of the steps don’t apply to things like my newsletter and blog posts, every piece of content I create moves through the following stages:
- Potential Ideas
- Next Up
- Study and Outlining
- Writing
- Edit Writing
- Recording
- Edit Recording
- Schedule & Publish
So, the current plan at least is to publish a Newsletter on a Monday, blog post on Tuesday and Thursday (one will be a shorter post and the other a bit more meaty), a podcast on a Friday, a YouTube video on a Saturday and maybe a YouTube short or two at other points through the week.
From this, I plan my creation schedule. What this means is allocating slots on my calendar for writing, recording and editing etc. So, I have writing slots on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays & Fridays. I have a recording slot on Wednesday evening and then editing slots for videos on a Friday.
So, that takes care of allocating the time.
I then use an app to manage the the status of each piece of content as it moves through the creation process. I have tried many apps for this including Trello, Asana, ClickUp, ToDoist and Notion. To be honest, most of these apps have the functionality I would need but currently I am using Notion for this.
I use a content management database that began being based on August Bradley’s free template but the version I now use is much simpler.
Part 3 – Using the system
Once a week, during my weekly planning session, I kick the whole process off for the next week. Some content will still be in the system as it will have been written the week before, but not finished or published yet. When I plan my week, I set up the next round of content that is moving from Potential ideas and next up. I set a planned publishing date and then a ‘next action date’. Whenever the next action is due, whatever the status is tells me what I need to do.
I am writing this post now because I have a writing slot on my calendar and as I look on my content dashboard in Notion, this post is in the ‘writing’ state and the next action is today. Once I have written it, I will change the status to ‘editing’ and update the next action to the next available date with an editing slot.
Some content, I can pretty much write from what is already in my head, like this one. Others, require much more study, research, planning and outlining. In theory, Tuesday evenings is dedicated to this. I tend to not give content a next action date if it is in the study and outline phase and just check this list on a Tuesday to work from it.
Part 4 – Drafting and writing
Everything is written in UpNote. Using Full Screen, Focus mode, typewriter mode and hiding the formatting bar (relying on slash commands) creates a distraction free writing environment. I also do a lot of this my tablet.
I have several notebooks in UpNote that I use to assist with this. All my content exists in multiple notebooks and this feature of UpNote is brilliant for this purpose.
I have one notebook each for blog posts, newsletters, videos and podcasts. So each piece of content will be in one of those, depending on what it is.
Then, I have a notebook for ‘draft posts’. Sometimes I write things that are just ideas, but I write them ‘in the moment’. These go here and get added to the ideas list. Some content I am researching and outlining, these also go in here.
When I start actually writing for publishing, it get’s moved out of ‘draft’ and to an ‘in production’ notebook. So, it might be in the ‘blog’ notebook and the ‘in production’ notebook. Once published, it moves out of here and into a ‘published’ notebook.
Part 5 – Remembering
I have an idea, not implemented yet, but something I plan to do. The idea is that I will create a database, table or spreadsheet, that lists all of my published work. When I implement it, it will likely have the following fields:
- Title
- Date published
- Type (blog, video etc)
- Topic
- Link to published item
- Link to my note where it was written (or the .md file)
I could do this in Notion, or UpNote or even Google Sheets, I haven’t decided yet.
So, that is how I manage my content creation process. Let me know if you have any comments or questions about any of this.
