What is my Content Blitz? [Solocast]

Key Points:

• Purpose of the Content Blitz: The blitz was initiated to address a large backlog of content and regain control over creative projects. The speaker felt overwhelmed by years of unfinished tasks and decided to tackle them in a concentrated effort rather than spreading them out over time.
• Structure and Sprints:
  • A "sprint" refers to a short, intense period of work focused on specific, measurable goals. The blitz involves multiple overlapping sprints.
  • Examples of sprints include:
    • Spotify Sprint: Adding clips and long-form videos for nearly 200 interviews on Spotify's new beta feature.
    • Blog Post Sprint: Writing over 100 blog posts, including repurposing older content and ideas into full-length posts.
    • Polymath Newsletter Sprint: Creating a year's worth of newsletter drafts in advance to maintain consistency.
    • Social Media Clips Sprint: Posting curated clips from interviews on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.
    • Polycast Sprint: Completing the seventh season of the podcast within a year while maintaining quality.
• Challenges Encountered:
  • Balancing the blitz with other commitments like a new retail job and seasonal affective disorder.
  • The tedious nature of some tasks, such as redoing videos or managing different social media platforms.
  • Stress from inconsistent past performance, particularly with newsletters in 2024.
• Philosophy Behind the Blitz:
  • The speaker emphasizes thinking "bigger" by combining multiple sprints into one larger blitz. This approach allows for greater productivity even if some individual sprints fall short.
  • They advocate for changing how people approach overwhelming workloads by focusing on concentrated efforts rather than spreading tasks thinly over time.

The speaker concludes by encouraging others to adopt a similar mindset for tackling large projects, highlighting the value of thinking strategically and ambitiously to achieve more significant results.

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Transcript:

00:00
Doing a content blitz. That's what I wanted to talk about today because I have been doing this content blitz since December. And ideally I would have gotten done in December, but I think due to just getting a new retail job for extra income, it distracted me a little bit. And the seasonal effect of disorder also impacted me quite heavily during this past like month or so. And so I wanted to talk about what the content blitz is, why I'm doing it, and what does it kind of entail on the micro scale. So content sprint, if you will.

00:29
is something, it was like a project that you're going to do a whole bunch of little tasks in this sprint. And so you might do a sprint within a week, think of like a Kanban board or project management kind of sprint. And so there's a whole bunch of measurable goals you can do. So for example, my first sprint for this Blitz was doing Spotify. And so Spotify came out with this beta feature for doing clips for interviews. I have nearly 200 interviews at this point, and I wanted to add a clip for each interview or 99% of them, at least.

00:57
And then I also realized that I can't just do short form video on there. I should be posting the long form video too. And so I went on there and added a long form interview to it as well, which is something that was very tedious and took a long time, a little bit longer than I expected actually than I think about it. And so I think that also impacted the blitz because I ended up having to redo a lot of videos over and over again. So this content blitz came out about, because I wanted to catch up to where I think I need to be when it comes to content, there's a lot of.

01:24
big, huge pool of content in my backlog that I needed to get done. And I felt that the best way to do it was to just burn through it and get it done as soon as possible. And so there's multiple sprints within this blitz. That's the whole idea of the blitz is that it's not just a sprint. It's not just one thing that I need to do. It's multiple things that I needed to do in a short time span, because I feel overwhelmed by it and so I figured let's just tackle it all at once rather than trying to spread it out over time. Cause I've done the whole sprint out over time and it's been lasting for the last four years, five years.

01:53
And so this all originated back from the Omni content series way back when, which I've talked about on this podcast years ago. So the content blitz entailed a handful of different sprints. I'll go over some of them. The Spotify one was one of them. Another sprint that I haven't really worked on. I've only been working on the other half, but basically half of blitz was going to be this one sprint and have to run a hundred or so blog posts. And that's what's really been stressing me out ironically, but there's other things in this blitz that I think are more time sensitive, like the Spotify thing.

02:22
And I wanted to get that first move or advantage with that. The next sprint. So there's Spotify sprints. There's the hundred blog posts sprint. Actually, it's a little bit more than a hundred, but it's about a hundred that I need to get done. And then I had the polymath newsletter sprint. And essentially what that entails is over the first year and a half or two years of me doing the polymath newsletter, I was very consistent as well as my other couple of newsletters too. And so I was doing all three newsletters consistently, like every week. Made me slight delays here and there, but I got them done.

02:49
And then over the last year in 2024, I did not get the newsletters done. In fact, I think I only really wrote newsletters half of the year. And it wasn't a consistent half. It was just like spread out. And so it was really bad. And it made me really upset that like I failed my audience that badly. And so I was like, okay, the only newsletter I'm really working on right now is the polymath one and the polytools one and the polytools one can wait a little bit because I got to revamp how I do it anyways, and that's okay. And so what the.

03:17
Idea was I need to finish the polymath newsletter or not finish, but finish with working on it. I thought let's just do the whole year's worth of posts ahead of time. And so I have about 35 drafts on my site that are related to these videos. And I wanted to write about that are polymathic related. And then I have about 83 ideas in my folder on my obsidian vault. And so I have at least 52 ideas right there that I can do for this first year. I might, maybe I'll even continue into next year and just have like a year and a half's worth ahead of time.

03:46
And that way I do not have to worry about being consistent anymore when it comes to that series. And so that was the idea behind that. The next sprint is actually posting clips. So LinkedIn is a little bit weird because there's the professional page and the personal page. And so people who connected with me on LinkedIn, they may already not care about my shows. And so I do want to post my clips on there for those who do care, but I don't want to post the same amount of clips that I did on other platforms. Cause I was pretty eccentric and doing like 10 a day. So I'm going to try to go in and try to find the best three.

04:16
clips for each interview and just post those. And I think that would be a great idea to really get people's attention without overwhelming them. I just post maybe one to three a day and just schedule it out really far ahead. But then the professional page is a bit different since professional page...