The short answer
- Decide four themes for the month before you write a single post. Four is small enough to remember and big enough to rotate.
- Write long once per theme - a page, not a post - then cut it into pieces. Cutting is faster than inventing.
- Build a rotating shape: teach, show, ask, tell. Reading the same shape daily gets boring; rotating it costs nothing.
- Put every piece in one calendar with a date, and leave two days a week empty on purpose.
- Batch the writing, spread the posting. Never decide content and publication on the same day.
The two-hour session
- Block two hours. Phone in another room; this session is the whole month.
- Pick four themes your reader cares about - not four things you want to say. Write them at the top of the page.
- Spend twenty minutes per theme writing the long version: what is true, what people get wrong, one example from your own work.
- Cut each long piece into four or five posts. One idea per post, first line doing the work.
- Assign dates across the month, leaving gaps. Note which posts need a picture or a screen, and make those later in one batch.
- Read the month back as a stranger: does anything repeat itself within a week? Move it.
What to do when the month goes sideways
It will. A busy week is not a failure of the plan, it is the reason for it: the posts exist, they just need to go out later. Move the dates, do not rewrite them.
Keep one slot every week for something that just happened - a question you got, a thing that broke, a number you noticed. That slot is what keeps an organised calendar from reading as a corporate feed.
- Missed a week? Push everything back and say nothing about it.
- Out of ideas mid-month? Re-read your own long pieces; there is usually a second post inside each one.
- Posting nothing is worse than posting something plain.
Where this goes wrong
- Planning thirty different posts instead of four themes cut into pieces.
- Writing the plan and the captions in the same breath, then running out of energy.
- Filling every day, so the first interruption breaks the whole calendar.
- Chasing a trend you cannot tie back to what you actually sell.
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 the calendar, the four-theme stack and the long-to-short cutter, in one spreadsheet with a 90-day view. 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?
One month. A quarter goes stale and a week means you are back to deciding daily, which is the problem you are solving.
Do I need a tool?
A calendar with dates and one folder of drafts is enough to start. The value is in the sitting, not the software.
Read next
How to choose a content calendar you will still keep in March, What to post when you have nothing to say.