Start from your worst week
Ask what you could still publish during a week when work is busy, you sleep badly and nothing goes to plan. That number is your cadence. For most people it is two or three posts, not seven.
Publishing above your baseline when things go well is a bonus. Setting the baseline at your best week guarantees you will miss it, and missing it is what makes people quit.
Content pillars
Pick three to five recurring themes you can return to indefinitely. A fitness creator might use form breakdowns, gear, mistakes, client stories and quick sessions.
Pillars solve the blank page. You are never deciding what to post from nothing, only which pillar is due and what this week's version of it is.
- Each pillar should support at least twenty posts. If it cannot, it is a topic, not a pillar.
- Rotate them so no pillar dominates a month.
- Track which pillar performs. Usually one carries most of your growth.
Batch by task, not by post
Making one post start to finish, then the next, is the slowest possible method because you pay the setup cost every time.
Batch by stage instead. Write six captions in one sitting. Film four videos in one session while the lighting is already right. Edit them together. The saving is large enough that it usually decides whether a schedule survives.
One filming session and one editing session a week is a realistic system for most people. Daily filming is not.
Keep a running idea list
The bottleneck is rarely time to make things. It is having something worth making when the time arrives.
Keep one note. Add to it whenever someone asks you a question, whenever you disagree with something you read, whenever you learn something that took you too long to find. Never sit down to a blank page.
Review monthly, not daily
Daily numbers are noise and checking them constantly is corrosive. Once a month, look at what performed, which pillar carried it and what you want more of.
Change one thing at a time. Changing format, topic and cadence together tells you nothing about which one worked.