Annual Review of Content Calendar Avoidance
The calendar was built in January. The first post was published in March. There were nine posts between January and now.
MICROFICTION Three months in the life of a content calendar.
January
The creator built a content calendar in a Google Sheet. The sheet had columns for date, platform, content type, topic, caption, status, and a final column called "Notes" that was never used.
The calendar ran from January through June. It contained ninety-four planned posts. The creator looked at it and felt organized. The creator posted a screenshot of the sheet to their stories with the caption "2022 is the year." Forty-one people watched the story.
The first post was scheduled for January 10. January 10 came. The post was not published.
February
February had twenty-eight days. The calendar had fourteen posts planned for February. Three were published.
The first February post performed well. The creator checked the analytics seventeen times across four days and made detailed notes about posting time and engagement rate. These notes were not added to the sheet. They were added to a separate document that was opened twice and then saved without being referenced again.
The second post performed worse. The creator developed a theory about why. The theory was reasonable. It also reduced motivation to post the third post while the theory was still in development.
The third post went up on February 27.
March
The creator did not open the content calendar for most of March. March was busy. March had a return to office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The commute days were not suitable for content because they disrupted the flow required for creativity, and flow is required for good content, and good content is the only kind worth publishing.
In late March, the creator opened the sheet and looked at the posts marked "planned" for March. There were eleven of them. The cursor hovered over the status column for each one. The creator closed the sheet.
April: Reckoning
The calendar still exists. It is a document of who the creator intended to be at the start of the year.
The calendar is not the problem. The calendar is evidence of a problem that predates the calendar. The problem is that the creator has useful things to say and limited tolerance for the gap between having something to say and it reaching the people who might find it useful. The gap requires publishing. Publishing requires overcoming the calendar.
The creator posted on April 4, April 11, and April 20. None were on the calendar. All were good.
May
In May, the creator made a new content calendar. It is simpler. One column. The column says "idea." There are seven ideas in it. Three have been published.
The creator has not told anyone about the new calendar.
The Wordle scores are still going in the group chat. The group chat has replaced the content calendar as the primary venue for the creator's observations. Nobody subscribes to the group chat. Nobody unsubscribes either.
Status
The original sheet is still open in a browser tab. The creator has not closed it. The tab has been there since February.
Review ends here. No summary provided because no summary is needed. This is what happened.