we re-wrote the monthly content planner. again.
fourth iteration in three years. the column we deleted, the one we doubled, and why "theme weeks" died for us in q2.
the planner that survives is the planner the team actually opens.
fourth version of the monthly content planner in three years. we deleted "theme weeks," added a community-led column, and made the whole thing readable in three minutes. version three was too clever. version four is, deliberately, almost boring.
the agency content planner is one of those artifacts that gets a quarterly facelift forever. ours has been rebuilt four times since 2022. three of those rebuilds added complexity. one took it away. only the simpler one is still in use.
version four ships as a single airtable. one row per post. eleven columns. the team opens it on a monday and can read the entire month in three minutes. that, more than anything else, is the design constraint that finally held.
— section onewhat died.
- 01"theme of the week." sounded smart. functioned as a constraint that no week ever lived up to. dead.
- 02"funnel stage." top of funnel, middle, bottom. nobody on the content team actually thought in those terms. the column was populated post-hoc. dead.
- 03"strategic pillar." four pillars. every post got tagged. the tag never changed the post. the pillar architecture lived on a separate slide and never collided with the planner. dead.
three columns deleted, one full level of cognitive load removed. the planner got read more, not less, after we made it dumber.
— section twowhat we added.
two columns. one is "community input" — the row from the friday synthesis that the post is responding to. it is the load-bearing column. if it's blank, the post needs a different reason to exist or it gets cut. the other is "after" — what happens to the post once it ships. is it a test, is it scheduled for paid amplification, is it the start of a series.
the column we added that did the most work is the one labelled "after." the planner is no longer a publishing schedule — it is a small operations doc.
the "after" column changed how we wrote posts. nobody scripts a one-off any more. every post is, on the planner, the start, middle, or end of something. if the row says "stand-alone," that's a flag for review.
— section threethe planner now.
- 01date · channel · format · hook (one line) · body (one line) · community input · after · owner · status · link to draft · notes
— section fourthe meetings that changed.
we also cut the monthly content meeting from 90 minutes to 30. the meeting now has one agenda item: walk through the planner row by row. no slides. no pillar reviews. no quarterly arc. the row either ships or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, we ask why on the spot.
this is, in retrospect, the same lesson as the planner itself. the meeting got smaller and the work got better. complexity in process is almost always a tax we don't notice we're paying.
— closingthe question to ask of your own planner.
open it. count the columns. ask which three you'd delete if forced. now delete them. wait two weeks. if the work got worse, put them back — you'll know exactly what they were doing. if the work didn't get worse, those columns were ceremony, not function, and you've just bought yourself two hours a week.
version five is probably coming. that is how it should be. a planner that hasn't been rebuilt in a year is a planner that has stopped being read.
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