Content calendars: reimagined
How to publish consistently (without burning out), lean on your intuition and fill in content gaps
As I gathered my arms around the idea of reimagining content calendars, I took a stroll through my own archives. I clicked on a file called “2014 Tracking Folders” and scrolled through the monthly spreadsheets I used for tracking the assignment and progress of blogs, ebooks, social media posts and more.
In the marketing agency’s busiest seasons, I was assigning, editing and approving 94 blogs in a month. I was meeting with account managers, strategizing about ebook and email campaigns and gathering information to take back to my writers. I was also learning how to translate editorial (print) calendar best practices into the new, emerging world of online content and digital consumption.
The work you and I are doing to produce our own newsletters is different from crafting more complex content strategies for small- to medium-sized businesses. But there are parts of that craft that can be helpful to translate over to us. So that’s why today I want to look at content calendars and share how I think we can add some gentle organization to our work while staying connected to the heart of our writing along the way.
But first, I’d like to say that my work for The Editing Spectrum pointed out to me that I had to shake off some old “hunker down” habits from my career. Content calendars had historically been a vehicle for wringing out my nervous energy. And looking back, I can see that part of my brain really enjoyed the brainstorming and organizing that comes with content calendars and strategies. But once I was diagnosed with autism and the light bulb came on around how all my work had only really ever set me up for burnout, I realized I had to start resisting these “hunker down” impulses. Thankfully, doing so helped give me a blank slate to discover what to keep and what to let go of while I bring my writing (not someone else’s idea, vision or business) into the world.
Looking back at the content calendars from my old life, I want to start by saying that calendars are best used as the vehicle for a vision. For me, my content calendar is like a long line of candles that helps light the path a few paces ahead so I can see where this writing may be going next. This is part of how I manage my tendency to want to “produce” writing rather than transmit something I feel has landed in my lap just for me to say. Practically speaking, I think content calendars need to be kept simple and pared down. The less bells and whistles, the better.
I have worked in most of the major content management systems and tried too many planning and organizational tools to count. They have their place in growing businesses where teams collaborate around complex content strategies. But for my solopreneur writer/editor hybrid, they almost always snowballed into a hairy beast I couldn’t wrangle after a while. I felt they ultimately began stealing me from the real “listening work” I needed to do to keep my writing in a place that felt spiritually, mentally and energetically sustainable.
These days the content calendar I use is pretty basic. When it’s time to organize and shift into the “publishing” activities for my writing, I need things to be super low tech and flexible. With this basic (free) Google sheets template, which I share with my editor
, we add in essays once they’re at a “yes/green light” space in my mind. But if need be, we can easily copy/paste to move them around between different months. I do try to keep a clear line between idea gathering and what I plan to publish.For anyone who’s interested: I gather essay inspiration in the messiest way possible. I’ve tried too many times to organize and make a “content lady” of myself, but I’ve learned that ideation needs to be almost feral for me to trust or like it. Practically speaking, I type or voice dictate into my Notes app or scribble ideas down in four or five different college-ruled spiral notebooks.
For today’s post, I want to talk about a few best practices that help me reimagine the role of content calendars in my work for The Editing Spectrum. I’ve shaped these to be as helpful as possible to a pretty specific writer: someone who is writing a newsletter and whose writing aspires to tell something new, true or compelling and who wants to do so in the gentlest, most intuitive way possible.
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