Between my two personal projects, I create a lot of content.
offlinemark:
- Blog – Writing
- Twitter – Shorter writing, writing meant to be seen more widely
- Youtube – Educational content, screencasts
- Podcast – Stories & lessons from my life, more personal
comfort (my music production project):
- Music
- Youtube – Educational content, screencasts on music production
- Podcast
I also have a travel blog that I don’t share publicly.
Some of these channels are more active than others, but I have three principles that help me do it all.
1 – Harvest, don’t generate
I try to harvest content from what I experience & learn in my life, rather than sit down, brainstorm, and generate content from nothing.
2 – Respect inspiration
I’m significantly more productive when I’m inspired, so I try to treat moments of inspiration with great respect and get to work when they come. Sometimes this means being awake at 5:18am writing (as I am now).
Rick Rubin talks about this exact concept in “The Creative Act”.
I try to avoid queueing things at all costs; if possible I just sit down and do it now.
3 – Have buckets for everything
Different kinds of ideas naturally have a medium in which they are best expressed. Insights or essays are best expressed in writing. Educational walkthroughs are best done via screencast. Stories are best told via audio.
I try to have “buckets” (media channels) ready to receive ideas in their best form the moment they strike. This helps you harvest as much of your creative potential as possible.
For a long time, I left content on the table by not having a podcast for offlinemark. I regularly had stories I thought of and wanted to share, but simply had no great place for them, so they weren’t shared. Now that I have the podcast, I notice that I fairly regularly have a thought that is suitable for that medium, and can capture it.
Bonus: 4 – Default to public, and iterate
Don’t get tied up polishing content before you publish it. Default to publishing whatever you have, and remember: You can always polish, expand, or re-release content later. Defaulting to in public maximizes the potential for it to be discovered.
Bonus (Dec 2023 ):
5 – Never let an idea slip
If you’re going to create a lot of content, step one is to not needlessly throw away good ideas when you have them. Ensure that you have some system or tools in place for quickly capturing ideas wherever you might have them. I heavily rely on “Hey Siri, remind me…” on my iPhone which lets me quickly record notes to process later. I use Omnifocus as my todo app which integrates with this. Omnifocus and most other todo apps have a “Quick Add” global keyboard shortcut which is useful if you’re already on your computer.
6 – Not all content needs to be long
Not all blog posts or content needs to be long and arduous to write. In fact, it’s better if it’s not.
7 – Minimize friction
My current blogging setup with WordPress feels very friction optimized — I just browse to my blog, click new post, write, and hit publish. No command lines. No writing in a separate app, then copying the post over. In-place construction if you will.
8 – One-shot it
Get in the habit of “one-shotting” content — forcing yourself to “finish” it in some way in the same session of work. It’s incredibly tempting to leave a piece in a half-finished state and say that you’ll come back later. But rarely does that ever happen and adding things to todo-lists/queues adds weight to your life that doesn’t feel good. Plus, forcing yourself to finish is a creative muscle in and of itself that can be exercised and improved at. I’ve noticed improvement with this for me for music making and writing.