How I Plan My Weekly Content Calendar
The secret to publishing content like clockwork? Creating a Monday content routine.
I have been doing a version of My Monday Checklist for the past decade, and it’s the key to not only staying organized, but also preventing the burnout that inevitably comes when you have to churn out content every. single. week.
After seeing my friend Kelsey at Coming Up Roses post her Sunday Checklist (highly recommend if you’re self-employed), I was inspired to make my Monday content routine official with my own version.
Believe me when I tell you, if you follow this planning checklist every Monday, you will stay on track to post consistently, create better content, and achieve the goals you set for 2024!
Plus, you’ll be super organized and your content calendar won’t get cluttered with out-of-date tasks.
Oh, and one quick thing before we jump in: The Perfect Content Calendar & Planner comes with my Monday checklist built-in, so it will pop up as a task for you to complete every Monday (and you can customize it to fit your unique content workflow). Buy it here for $39!
Now let’s get into it:
Step 1: Update Metrics
While your brain is waking up, we’ll start by doing some light ✨updating.✨
✅ Update metrics for the goals you’re tracking
✅ Update analytics for each platform
✅ Check in on invoices: are any payments late, or waiting to be invoiced?
Metrics to Keep an Eye on Weekly:
Total accounts reached
Followers/subscribers gained or lost
Website Visits
Step 2: Review Previous Week
Now let's take a moment to reflect on the past week before diving headfirst into the next one.
✅ Review the content you posted last week: what were your wins? What flopped? What can you learn from it? Incorporate into your content plan this week accordingly!
Take a minute to write down your best performing content → this will make doing your monthly content report so much faster! This could be in a doc, or if you’re using my Notion template you can just add this to your “Monday Checklist” page.
✅ How consistent was posting last week? Was there any content planned that didn’t actually go live? Are there any tasks blocking that content from getting published?
I use this time to check in on my consistency tracker, check off any days I might have missed, and review my average consistency score (hopefully it went up!).
🧠 Consistency Tip: you can’t improve what you don’t measure, which is why taking the time to log your habits and reflect on them will help you be more consistent!
The Consistency Tracker is a page I built in The Perfect Content Planner because I needed something to keep me accountable to posting more.
There’s a little journal at the bottom with prompts, and just having the weekly reminder to check in on my goals has really helped me identify what, exactly, is blocking me from posting content and improve my consistency over time.
Step 3: Plan Weekly Content Calendar & Work Projects
Now that our brains are warmed up, it’s time for my favorite part: content planning! 🎉
The content framework that I use (and teach) is all about planning the “big” pieces of content on a monthly basis, and then filling in the daily content pieces on a weekly basis. You can read more about it here!
I just find it way too overwhelming to plan every.single.post a month at a time, and I’ve also found that it’s way too easy to get “plan happy” and plan out a ton of content…only to inevitably run behind, miss deadlines, get discouraged, and end up in a shame spiral.
✅ Choose new publish dates for any content that was supposed to go out but didn’t
✅ See what “big” or recurring content pieces are planned this week
✅ Check your content queue to make sure that any upcoming content is on track to meet deadlines, adjust accordingly if needed
✅ Move content out of your backlog and choose publish dates for it on your content calendar
✅ Check to see what audios are trending this week and how you can incorporate them into your content calendar (I recommend subscribing to my newsletter Trendspotter to help with this! 😉)
✅ Consult your list of “content ideas” to see if there’s anything you want to add to the week
✅ No backlog or content ideas? Scroll through your saved content or take a few minutes to scroll Reels and TikTok to get inspired.✨
Once you have a full content calendar for this week, the planning doesn’t stop there.
✅ Check your content calendar against your content pillars and the ‘goals’ of your content (eg awareness or sales). Are you posting too much of one content pillar and not enough of another? Do you need to post more content that actually drives sales?
This is why I recommend using a content calendar that allows you to filter your calendar by content pillar or goal, it will help ensure you stick to that brilliant content strategy you created!
And since we want to make sure we actually follow through with our content calendar, there’s more planning to do:
✅ Choose a publish date for each piece of content
✅ List out every task for each piece of content you have in your content cal this week (eg. film XYZ, edit XYZ, post XYZ)
✅ Assign each task a “do” date. This is the day you are actually going to do the task, which may be different than the day it’s due. I recommend making your “do” date at least 1 day before the “due” date to give yourself some buffer room if you’re having a low/no energy day.
I’m not going to lie, planning out do dates for each task will take some time, but it’s SO worth it (especially if you have ADHD like me).
The reason it’s important to list out each task is because it helps fight time blindness.
Seeing every little task in front of you can help you better estimate how long something is actually going to take you to complete, and it will help you plan a realistic content calendar that you can actually stick to.
If you’re overwhelmed at the thought of creating tasks for every piece of content, let me plug The Perfect Content Planner again.
I created the template with 25 content creation templates so you can plan a post and every task that goes with it in just one click! All you have to do is assign a ‘do’ date.
Now that our content calendar is planned out, it’s time to:
✅ Repeat the same process for your other work projects that aren’t content
Once every task is assigned a ‘do’ date (and assigned to a person, if you’re working in a team), it’s time to review all the work you planned for the week.
This is the most important part if you want to prevent burnout!!
The only way you’ll be able to be consistent is if you’re realistic. If you’re too ambitious with your planning and don’t leave any buffer room, you’ll get frustrated when you start to get behind on tasks and miss deadlines.
This can create a burnout cycle and it can also cause you to feel like a failure, so you just give up because you’re frustrated at how far behind you are. But you’re not a failure, you just need to improve your planning! Look at this Monday Checklist as a fresh start each week, it’s okay if you didn’t post everything last week - you can post some or all of it this week!
✅ Review the task workload for each day. Do you have way too much planned for each day? Are some days really full and others light?
✅ Adjust your “do” dates and publish dates accordingly!
If you’re using The Perfect Content Planner, open your “content dashboard” home page and look at the “this week” board, which automatically pulls in all the tasks you planned for each day:
If you’re working in teams, pull up each team member’s “content dashboard” page and look at their “this week” board -> is it too much? Remember to check against their calendar to see if they are out of office! Adjust your tasks accordingly.
Step 4: Schedule Your Week
Congrats — the hard part is over! Now it’s time to pull up your work and life calendars and schedule in time to do everything you’ve planned.
✅ Pull up your calendar and schedule in time to complete your tasks for the week
✅ Block out time to get ready for filming on your calendar - this is a work task and part of your job! Maybe plan to film a GRWM while you’re at it?
✅ Book any appointments you might need for filming or your content (for me that’s my nails and weekly blowout). You can also add content to your calendar based on the appointments you have booked: visiting your warehouse or getting your haircut? Create content out of it!
You don’t have to plan every task by the minute in your calendar (that’s my personal nightmare), but you want to block out time in your calendar for the big things like:
Prep for filming: do you need to find a recipe and go grocery shopping to film a cooking video? Schedule in time for grocery shopping. Are you planning to film a day in the life vlog? Choose a day in your calendar that has interesting things happening in it (or the most regular day!)
Filming: looking at your calendar, what day do you have the most time free to batch your content and film? Block out that time in your calendar, and then go back to your planner and make sure you have enough time to complete the pre-filming tasks before that date. (eg filming on a Wednesday, so you need to have enough time to script all your videos on Monday/Tuesday before you film them).
Editing: I like to have chill editing days, so I’ll usually assign the least busy day in my calendar to do all of my admin tasks and editing.
🧠 Mental Health Tip: it’s totally okay to use your ‘do’ dates as a general guideline if that works better for you. If you struggle with mental health, it’s best to pad your planning with more buffer room so you don’t make your mental health worse by being super stressed at missing deadlines.
If assigning tasks ‘do’ dates isn’t working for you, you could also list out your tasks and divide them into high/low energy tasks so you can choose which tasks to work on based on your energy level.
🗓 Planning tip: If you use Google Calendar, this is where Notion Calendar is a huge help! Not only can you have your work and personal calendars together, but you can also bring in your Notion tasks.
It’s super easy to take a task that was assigned for today and drag it down to a specific time slot in your day. See how it works here:
Step 5: Review…*Again*
Now that every task is planned and you have scheduled time in your calendar for everything you need to do…how’s it looking?
✅ Review your tasks and calendars again: do you have enough time to realistically complete all the content and work you have planned?
Spoiler alert: It’s probably too much. Shift some content to next week or adjust the ‘do’ dates on your tasks.✅ Are there any blockers for your content that is planned that you need to remove?
✅ Creators and freelancers: do you have a brand partnership or project due and you need to ask for an extension? Asking a few days before and being pro-active in your communication will go a long way!
My rule of thumb is to remove 25% of the content you have planned to make your content calendar attainable. If you have 4 posts scheduled, remove 1.
This way you will be motivated to actually achieve it…while reducing burnout and stress.
Alright, well, that’s the checklist! I would say that realistically this takes me about 1.5-2 hours to do each week, but it will depend based on a) the amount of content you’re publishing, b) how complex the content is, and c) how many team members you are working with.
My Monday planning sessions are pretty sacred to me, I absolutely love the planning process and I love starting off the week by getting myself organized and set up for the week. Mid-week, when I’m deep in the trenches of executing that plan? Well, that’s a whole other thing. 🤣
You can bookmark this checklist to come back to each week, and feel free to just use it as a loose guideline or inspiration for you to create your own weekly content routine!
Every person is different, and everyone has their own unique way of working. So what works for my Capricorn/Virgo self may not work for you, and that’s okay! That’s why I created The Perfect Content Planner to be totally customizable to work with you, and not against you.
If you want more content strategies like this (and a weekly dose of fresh content ideas), subscribe to my newsletter Trendspotter! I send it (almost) every Monday so it’s perfect timing for your content planning sessions. Happy planning!