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.

---

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