This week, the ProductivityCast team discusses the tools and tricks for producing content productively. Content production is not just for marketers; it's a fundamental component of many of our job duties. So, producing content productively can really help us save time and garner a stronger reputation among our peers and employers.
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In this Cast | Producing Content Productively
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Show Notes | Producing Content Productively
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Evernote
Dropbox
Apple Notes
Trello
Workflowy
OneNote
Notion.so
Google Drive
Ulysses
Scrivener
Google Docs
Hemingway
WordPress.org (software)
WordPress.com (hosting)
Raw Text Transcript | Producing Content Productively
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24And today, we are here to talk about something that many of us have to deal with on a regular basis. And we don't actually form formalize the process many times which of course, competes with our productive output, and that is our productive output. How do we create content, whether that be for internal purposes, you know, internal memos, if you work at a law firm, you have to do legal memoranda. If you're at a company where you have documentation that needs to be kept, you're constantly having to write including probably email as well where you know, some email requires quite a bit of substantive thought process plus outbound content, whether that's for a blog, a podcast scripting, video scripting, and all kinds of other kinds of outbound. You're writing short guides or ebooks for the company, we have to write a lot of content in our daily work lives, especially in the knowledge worker age. And what we want to do today is talk about some of the the gears that are necessary to make that engine so that you don't have to have your system be so hodgepodge to be cluttered and chaotic in the process of getting your content out the door. And so let's start off with some of the challenges people have with producing content productively.
Art Gelwicks 1:42Well, I think some of the main areas that I see consistently are one getting ideas for content, evaluating those ideas and then putting them into a content production schedule. The actual creation of the content itself whether it's writing the article, recording the podcast, The review and approval, especially if you're dealing within a business environment, that can often be one of the biggest bottlenecks to your production process. And then finally, how is that content distributed to your audience? And what feedback are they providing to you? And how do you incorporate that into the lifecycle of your content production process? So there's a lot of different steps that can be issues.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:27Absolutely. So let's try and tackle some of these in that order. Throughout this episode, I'm not sure we can really deal with the review and approval process. But we might touch on that as we as we make our way through. So let's start with the concept of kind of the macro level here of how do you gather ideas and set the tone for any content that you're going to be doing? And so I'm going to I'm going to use a blog as the easiest perspective here, but we could go in we this could work for almost anything. In essence, unless it's a one off kind of project, but the idea here is that you would have some kind of thematic calendar or schedule that you've created, so that you are not trying to ideate in this amorphous expansive field, you really need structure in which to be creative. I know that sounds very counterintuitive, but you need structure in order to be creative. And the boundaries help you be creative. And so whatever it is that you're going to be talking about, giving yourself some level of boundaries, some kind of theme allows you to be able to then brainstorm within that space, and then to be able to come up with ideas for topics, parts of, you know, the outlined parts of of a of a topic, you know, so you might say, Okay, well, I'm going to talk about this particular topic. I'm gonna talk about cars. Okay, well, what kind of cars are going to talk about and then once you pick a particular A type of car, say Toyota Prius, okay, well, you know, there are different models of Prius. And then you start talking about the different. So maybe the idea that is Oh, well, I'll talk about kind of the history of the Prius, and how it came to be. And I'll talk about some of its particular finer points before I go into compare and contrast between the different models of them. So the the brainstorming process really helps you once you have a theme, but if you don't have that theme, then you know what, what is the Lewis Carroll quotation? You know, if you have nowhere to go anywhere, we'll do something like that, you know, you really need to have some overarching direction.
Augusto Pinaud 4:41Interestingly, when you go into writing, one of the counter intuitive things is how much organization you need in order to really make the writing happen. You know, people think, Oh, well, you know, I will just sit and write and I wish to tell you that that works. haven't worked. For me a bit, but for me requires a lot of organization and when you read about, you know more, say mainstream or famous writers, they all have a structure on a plan. And I think it is really important regardless what the content you are producing, what is going to be that instructor where you are going to capture the ideas because the ideas will come Hey, write about x, okay, write about the Prius write about how about I write about the right button under the radio fantastic, but if you don't capture those ideas, what happened is they get back to to the author and after you capture them now. Okay, let's start with your outline. In this. What we're going to do is is where I'm trying to go with this article, so you can go into the actual writing and then editing and approving and everything else, but I think you need that and I think you need this structure to be able to do that in a more more effective way. And when we get to the to the next part, let's talk about software that we use a person who writes, you know, short content, like a blog and articles, but also write long content, like books, it is important, I use different tools for those two kind of writing because they require a completely different mindset. When you are doing one thing or the other.
Art Gelwicks 6:31I'm going to take it from kind of a corporate business positioning. If you're generating content, one of the key structures of this at the very early stages is does your content align with the corporate strategies that you have in place and the objectives that you're trying to drive within your business as you come up with ideas, or you're even just farming ideas. One of the first steps is to make sure those ideas are on those correct roads. Using your analogy from earlier, if not, they may be great ideas, but they're not going to help you stay on the target that you've already set out for yourself. So being able to quantify the idea immediately, I think about for process tools that I've built, if somebody puts in an idea, the literally the next step, the next field is how does this tie to the strategic needs? You know, which one of the strategic goal sets for this particular group team company organization? Does this resonate with? And if they can't quantify that, then it's okay. It's a good idea. But we're not going to do anything with that right now.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:40I really love the idea of making sure that whatever whatever you're doing is in alignment with the mission or goal of the greater organization. And that that could be you know, your, your fundraising committee at church. It could be your your library book club. It could be your company or organization, your nonprofit organization, it doesn't matter what the group of people it is, if you have a mission, I think that you should have all of this, make sure that it's an alignment. I really, really like that art. Next up, I want to I want to talk a little bit about once you once you have the the organization of designing those things, and there are lots of templates online for this. So you can just google templates for all kinds of things. So don't try and reinvent the wheel here. Use the templates that are available for framework and then you can start plugging in your ideas from there. My big next step,
