The 3-Step Framework I Use To Prioritize My Daily Writing Tasks & Build a Content Flywheel (As An Online Writer)

The 3-Step Framework I Use To Prioritize My Daily Writing Tasks & Build a Content Flywheel (As An Online Writer)

For 5 years, I built my freelance writing business and personal newsletter on the side while working in tech.

As I juggled multiple clients and writing projects, I consumed all sorts of content to learn how to prioritize my work:

• I read books, like Getting Things Done, Eat That Frog, and Deep Work

• I watched YouTubers like Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, and Matt D'avella

• I took courses like Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain and Khe Hy's Supercharge Your Productivity

And all of these things helped me a ton. But I still struggled to answer basic prioritization questions, like…

• How do I split my time between generating new content ideas vs turning them into essays?

• How much time do I spend on writing vs marketing tasks?

• How do I balance solitude for writing and thinking vs soliciting feedback on my ideas?

• I agree that writing 90 minutes a day is an important habit. But what do I write?

Most importantly, how do I find the time to do all of this while working a full-time job?

A few notes before we get into it:

• I’m assuming you have 1-2 hours a day to spend on your writing. This framework will help you prioritize what to write during that time (ex. tweets vs long tweets vs essays)

• These steps are meant to build a system over the course of a few weeks. If you choose to follow this, the first month will be uncommonly hard. But it will get easier over time.

• With this framework, marketing and customer validation are baked into the content creation process. Yay!

• I’ll be introducing flow and stock – these are terms from systems thinking that illustrate how each step relates to the other to create a content flywheel that improves over time.

If I had to start all over again as a beginner, this is the simple framework I wish I had for prioritizing my writing tasks while working a demanding 9-to-5:

Step 1: Start with publishing micro ideas

In systems thinking, flow are the inputs and outputs of a system.

In the content creation system for a new writer, ideas are the inflow. Published content are the outputs.

My outputs, specifically, come in the form of 280-character tweets. I put out a lot of small ideas daily to generate data points. I then develop the ideas that resonate into progressively larger pieces of content.

Now here’s where many beginning writers and creators go wrong (me included):

We spend far too much time on what I call Paper Pushing Activities to procrastinate from doing the Real Work of writing, like…

• Redesigning your website

• Rewriting your Twitter bio

• Replying to other creators’ tweets

Don’t get me wrong. Having a website, having a bio that converts, and commenting on larger accounts are important activities to build and grow an audience.

But if you’re a part-time writer with a 9-to-5, you won’t have time to do this.

The most important task is to publish a piece of writing each day.

• Without tweets for them to consume, the folks who visit your profile have no way to decide if they want to follow you or not.

• Without traffic from your social content, you’ll be agonizing over the colours of a Squarespace website that no one will see.

• Without data from published tweets to go by, you’ll never know what compels people to follow you and why they like your writing.

This published content is the lifeblood, the initial domino, of any creator’s career.

Creating net-new content is the toughest task for many writers.

So obsess over flow first. Only after you have a steady flow of shortform pieces of content should you move to Step 2.

Step 2: Evaluate the published ideas

In systems thinking, stock are "holding tanks" where flow pools together.

If tweets are the flow of a writer’s content system, then the Twitter feed is the stock for ideas waiting to be developed into essays, threads, and newsletters.

But how do you know which tweets to expand?

Here’s how I do it: Each week on Typefully, I filter my tweets by engagement.

• The top 3 tweets get turned into 3 atomic essays.

• The top atomic essay gets turned into a Twitter thread.

• The top thread gets turned into a newsletter.

This is a different way of writing than just sitting down for 3-4 hours to write an essay. In fact, this system is more like a content development process than a writing workflow. But here’s why it works:

• Incorporating feedback and reader validation at each stage of the writing process teaches me what works and what doesn’t. I have a ton of ideas that I find exciting, but that others find boring.

• Spreading out the ideation and writing process allows my subconscious to develop and chew on ideas over time. When I do sit down to write, I can come up with more creative examples and stories, and communicate them more clearly.

• Knowing that my readers resonate with the idea and with the delivery before I put days or weeks into a longform piece increases the probability that the time and effort I put into a longer piece will have a positive ROI.

• I no longer write from a blank page. Each tweet is a proven outline in itself. All I have to do is follow it to add stories, examples, and other supporting evidence when I expand into an atomic essay or Twitter thread.

By the time an idea hits yours inbox in the form of this newsletter, it will already have gone through 3-4 weeks of ideation, refinement, and scrutiny.

The newsletter you’re reading right now is a perfect example. This started out as an atomic essay I published on September 7.

It performed well, so I expanded it into this newsletter that’s published on September 22.

You can even compare how the piece evolved in the last 2 weeks, which parts are from the original post, and which ones are new.

This not as sexy as simply sitting down to write 2,000 words a day. But this level of experimentation and systems is what it takes win the modern writing game.

Step 3: Expand proven content

Let’s recap:

1. Be obsessed with producing flow – the smallest package of content you can publish.

2. Evaluate the stocked up flow. Double down on the topics and ideas that resonate.

Next armed with the data from Step 2, I block out the days in my calendar to expand on the topics that did well.

Here’s what my general weekly content cadence looks like this:

For the past two weeks, this is what my creation schedule has looked like:

• Mon

  • Expand last week’s top tweets into 3 atomic essays.

  • Publish one today and schedule the other two to publish on Wed and Fri.

• Tue

  • Expand last week’s top atomic essay into a Twitter thread. Publish.

• Wed

  • Write and schedule 3 tweets per day for the next week (21 tweets)

• Thurs

  • Expand last week’s top essay into the newsletter. Schedule to go live on Friday.

• Fri

  • Weekly review to plan out next week’s content, add bullet points to atomic essays, and add new ideas into tweet drafts.

When I first started out, my only source of flow were my tweets. But each week I systematically traded up and expanded memorable pieces into longer, meatier pieces of content.

Growing an audience on social media is all about prioritizing creating microcontent and trading up the chain, especially as a beginner or time-strapped writer.

To succeed as a writer, gurus make you think you need to…

• Create Tiktok videos

• Repost on LinkedIn

• Create carousels for Instagram

… On top of writing 2 Twitter threads each week to get attention for your work.

This is beyond overwhelming.

If you don’t know what to do first, follow my blueprint and focus on the flow:

• Start with batch scheduling 2-3 ideas per day, in the form of micro-content.

• Next, pick 3 to expand on, while publish another batch of ideas.

• Keep expanding.

Take it one week at a time. If you miss a flow task, scale it back until your writing capacity increases.

I love this system because it bakes…

• Creation

• Marketing

• Reader feedback

… Into a practical daily schedule that most people can follow.

Finally, you might be wondering, how long do I need to stick with this cadence until I see results?

I can rapidly add a new piece of content each week because I’ve been doing this for years.

Even then, the results aren’t coming as quickly as I’d like. But I’m in this for the long haul:

• To grow my audience, I’m with the content cadence I outlined above for 12 months until Aug 2024.

• To stay focused, I’ll only be doing Twitter for at least 6 months until Jan 2024.

It took me 7 months of writing, thinking, and experimenting to get to this strategy. Now that I have this, it’s time to put my head down and work.

Note: If you want to learn more about stock and flow, and how they factor into content creation systems, check out this short post I wrote entitled: “Stock, Flow & Slack: The 3 Key Components of Content Creation Systems”.

😉 You're welcome

A selection of interesting links & fun recommendations. It gets random.

• ▶️ How to Clean Your Blundstone Boots. This week, I bought some saddle soap and mink oil and spent some time cleaning and prepping my boots for fall. This video is the simplest explainer I found — and now my boots look brand new again.

• 🐦 Reminder: Writing isn’t about writing words. It’s about changing minds.

• ❝ Quote I’m pondering