A formula beats a calendar

The calendar arrives with good intentions and twelve empty boxes. By the second week the boxes contain a subject you thought of on the train, and by the fourth they contain the word IDEA in capital letters, and then the whole thing quietly stops being opened.

Nothing went wrong with your discipline. The tool was answering the wrong question. Scheduling is not the hard part of publishing. Deciding what to make is the hard part, and a calendar has no opinion about that whatsoever.

What is a calendar doing for you?

Sequencing work, responsibilities and deadlines. A calendar becomes more useful once the recurring formats and priorities are clear.

A calendar helps organise ongoing publishing, but it cannot decide the creative direction by itself. A repeatable format supplies a starting structure for the ideas entered into it.

You can see this in how people use them. The calendar for the next fortnight is detailed. The month after is a colour with no text in it. The blank part is the tool reporting that it cannot help with the part you find difficult.

What is a formula?

A repeatable form. Same shape, same slot, different subject.

Not a topic and not a series. A form is the structure the video takes: how it opens, what it promises, how long it runs, what the title looks like, what happens at the end. Once that is settled, planning stops being invention and becomes selection, because the only remaining question is which subject goes into the shape this week.

Written out, a formula is one line. Every Tuesday morning, one common mistake in my trade, why it happens, and the fix, in under four minutes, titled as the mistake. That sentence does more work than a year of calendar squares, because it can be executed on a bad week by somebody who is not feeling inspired, which is most weeks for everybody.

Where do you find yours?

In the videos you have already made that outperformed your own average.

Pull up your last twenty and find the ones that did better than your normal range. Not the biggest ever, the ones that beat their neighbours. Then look for what they share, and look at form, which is the step people skip.

Did they all open on the thing itself rather than on you? Were they all answering a question rather than covering a topic? Were they all shorter? Did they all name a specific problem in the title? Did they all end by showing a result?

Usually two or three features recur, and you have been producing them by accident. Write the pattern down as an instruction and you have converted luck into a method, which is the entire exercise.

If nothing recurs, or you have too few videos to see a pattern, borrow a form from the research on adjacent channels and run it for two months. Borrowing a structure is not copying, since the subject and the person are still yours. It just saves you inventing a wheel that already rolls.

A fixed slot for the form

A recognisable format and a workable publishing rhythm can support each other. Use a schedule the team can sustain, and adjust it when the work or audience gives a reason. How to choose a useful starting time is discussed in its own post.

Decisions the form makes for you

Length, structure, opening, title shape, ending, publication day. Six decisions removed from every single piece of work.

What remains is the subject, and subjects are the easy part once the shape is fixed, because a shape generates them. One common mistake in my trade immediately produces nine of them without any thinking at all, and your comments produce the rest.

This is also what makes delegation possible. A formula can be handed to somebody else. An editor working to a known form makes fewer wrong guesses, a first cut lands closer, and the number of revision rounds falls for reasons that have nothing to do with anybody's ability.

In this studio the unit being planned is the formula rather than the individual post, for the plain reason that nobody wants to be in the business of hunting content that lands by luck. Luck does not scale and it cannot be handed over.

The boring part

A familiar structure can free attention for the new subject. It should still leave room for a better opening, a useful surprise or a piece that needs a different form.

Repeatable production can make a channel more consistent. It need not make the work uninteresting to produce, and an exciting idea does not make a channel scattered.

Try one repeatable form over a period long enough to learn from it. Review the audience response and production effort, then keep, adjust or retire it. Consistency is useful when it serves the work.