The short answer
- Choose something that shows one month at a time, not a year.
- It has to hold ideas you have not written yet, not only finished posts.
- It must survive a week you skip without turning red or telling you that you have failed.
- If it lives inside a tool that also schedules and measures, ask what happens the month you stop paying.
- The smallest format you will open on a Monday morning is the right one.
Ask these before you commit
- Can I see thirty days on one screen without scrolling sideways?
- Is there a place for half-formed ideas, with a note about why I saved them?
- Can I move a post to next week without deleting it and typing it again?
- Does it remember which posts repeated which idea, so the same angle does not arrive twice?
- Can I mark where an idea came from, so I know what to read more of?
- Will it open in five years, in a plain spreadsheet program, with no account attached?
The honest arithmetic of a plan
A plan is a promise about volume, and volume is where plans break. Count the posts you actually finished in the last month, divide by four, and write that number down. That is your weekly number, and it is probably smaller than the one you would like.
Build the plan around the real number, then leave one slot a week deliberately empty. The empty slot is not laziness; it is the space where the thing that actually happened that week goes.
- Two finished posts a week beats seven planned and three posted.
- Batch in one sitting and fill gaps in another. Two sittings, not seven.
- Write the first line and the point of each post. Full captions belong to the day you write them.
Where this goes wrong
- Running three half-filled calendars, one per tool, none of them the truth.
- Planning per platform when you post the same idea in three places anyway.
- Treating a missed post as a debt to repay, which turns a quiet week into a reason to stop.
- Buying a scheduler before you have four weeks of finished posts to schedule.
The free tool for this
There is no calculator that answers this one honestly, so here is the free set: eight calculators for rates, quotes, invoices, splits, prices and fees. They run in the page and send nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
Content Engine is ninety days of posts decided in one sitting: six pillars, thirty written skeletons, a repeat pattern, and a repurpose map so one good post works four times. Content Engine is $17. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
How far ahead should I plan?
A month, plus a loose list of ideas for the next one. A quarter of detailed entries is fiction by week five, and you will rewrite it anyway.
Should I plan the caption too?
Only the opening line and the point you are making. Full captions are better written the day you post, when you know what your week actually did.
Read next
How to plan a month of posts in one sitting, What to post when you have nothing to say.