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Finding My Content Creation Groove
Ever since July, I have found myself stuck on the content creation hamster wheel.
Yes, the queen of batching has been inconsistent and all over the place with her own content. Why? Because I haven’t been following my own system.
Or, more correctly, because life has been life-ing and I didn’t take the time to re-evaluate my own system.
In today’s episode I’m sharing all of the things I finally figured out and wish I had done sooner to get myself back off the content creation hamster wheel and back into the content creation groove. Plus, a few extra tips that would help as well that you could try if you’ve found yourself in the same place.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business? Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives. Each week I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5-minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time. Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or 1:1 services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays! You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YT – @mrsamandawarfield or by heading to amandawarfield.com/youtube/ – I hope to see you Monday!
- This week’s action step: Put Batch Week on Your Calendar for the Rest of the Year
- This week’s book recommendation: The Lost Summers of Newport by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
Ever since July, I have found myself stuck on the content creation hamster wheel. Yes, the queen of batching has been inconsistent and all over the place with her own content. Why? Because I haven’t been following my own system. Or, more correctly, because life has been lifing and I didn’t take the time to reevaluate my own system.
So in today’s episode, I’m sharing all of the things I finally figured out and wish I had done sooner to get myself back off that content creation hamster wheel. Plus, a few extra tips that would help as well, that you could try if you’ve found yourself in the same place. You’re listening to episode 216 of the Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield.
This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield. com / book.
How do I find time to create content without the whelming How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing, welcome friend, this is chasing simple where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.
If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here, to help make marketing simple and less time consuming, so that you can spend less time on your marketing, and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week, I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee, or whatever your drink of choice is, and meet me here each week for love, support, and more. Practical tips and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business?
Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4 p. m. Pacific time, 7 p. m. Eastern time for my weekly YouTube lives. Each week, I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short five minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time.
Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or one on one services. But now, All you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays. You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YouTube, at Mrs. Amanda Warfield, or by heading to amandawarfield. com / YouTube.
I hope to see you Monday! When I teach my students how to create their own batch week routines, and set up their own batch week, and then go through their own batch week, one of the things that I emphasize Batchweek doesn’t have to go perfectly in order to be successful because Life happens, life throws us curveballs, and so very rarely does our week ever go exactly how we plan for it to.
Meaning that often, our batch weeks don’t get as complete as we hope they would, right? And that’s okay. That’s normal, and what we end up doing is enough to keep us off of that content creation hamster wheel. However, What happens when life throws you curveballs? major major curveballs back to back to back and You find yourself essentially, you know treading water or possibly even drowning a bit and you just are able to do anything but the very bare minimum for life and business.
Well, that is where we end up in this place of being stuck back on that content creation hamster wheel, right? I, like I mentioned in the introduction, had this happen in the last year, and I am finally back in a place where I am no longer feeling like I’m on the content creation hamster wheel. And I wanted to share with you how I got back off of it so that maybe it doesn’t last quite so long for you.
So this started for me technically at the end of July, but because I had batched content August of last year, and it’s, Me, as I’m recording this, and I have been on the content creation hamster wheel for that long. If you’ve been around, you know my book launched in July of last year. And I launched on my birthday and I had, you know, everything prepped out for all of July, all of August, all of that content was scheduled, ready to go, right?
I was on my usual batching game. So for my birthday and for the book launch, we did this massive birthday, you know, thing where we spent time in Seattle and then we spent like with our friends, cause at the time we were living in South Carolina still, and then we flew down to Disneyland and it was.
Absolutely incredible. And because I had patched, it was no big deal, right? Taking time off, great, exciting, wonderful. Well then, day of my birthday, our final day of the trip, I came down with COVID. Now this was also the day of the book launch, where I was supposed to be showing up and going live and all of this stuff.
Didn’t happen. Five days later, my grandfather passes. So that was very end of, like, last day of July. He passes. Then, in August, Russell’s mother passes. And then, in September, we decide to move across the country. October, we’re dealing with buying a house that we’ve never seen. You know, it, all the stuff.
November, I moved, started a part time job. And December, there was flying back for Christmas, getting the other cat. So unfort like, every month was something. January, I had multiple conferences to attend. February, I don’t even know what happened in February. Oh, we had camp for my second job. My side hustle, I guess you can call it.
And, and then in March, we spent three weeks in Japan. Russell finally moved out here. April, we finally got our stuff and have spent the last month unpacking. I mean, it has literally been a month. major curveballs, even though some were planned, non stop since July of last year. And I have spent this entire time off of the content creation hamster, er, on the content creation hamster wheel off of my batch week schedule, and I have been desperately trying to get back.
The first thing that I wish I had done, and that I highly encourage you to do, is to acknowledge that life is difficult. extra full right now. It’s extra full right now. Give yourself grace that you don’t need to have it all figured out, that you don’t need to have your perfect batch week. This was something I really struggled with.
I kept thinking I needed to put out the exact same amount of content that I’ve always put out and if I could just, if I could just sit down and do a batch week it would be fine. But of course, wasn’t able to just sit down and do a batch week. That’s not how life works. When you have other things that are taking precedence and you’re, you’re treading water, you can’t just sit down and do a batch week, right?
It’s got to be something that you’ve intentionally planned for. And in this case, I needed to intentionally plan for a lot less than I was trying to fit in. And I wasn’t giving myself that grace and I wasn’t really acknowledging that life was extra full. Like I was. But then I would brush it off and say well life is really full, but man gotta get this batch week done You know, so that was something that I wish I had done.
I wish I just said you know what life is really full What can I do to get back on the schedule and get back to putting at least some content out consistently, right? the next thing that I needed to do is to schedule out batch week for the rest of the year. Now, putting batch week on the calendar for every single month is one of the things that I do when I plan out my year.
And so I did have batch week on the calendar, but what I really needed to do was go back in and re schedule batch week for the rest of the year. Because I, again, wasn’t giving myself the appropriate amount of grace, I wasn’t being realistic with myself, and There were new things that have been added to my calendar since I originally set up the calendar that made some of these batch weeks not really possible.
When you put your batch weeks on the calendar, it is important to know that the next few months, they may be chaotic, because realistically, when you put batch week on the calendar, ideally, the only thing you’re doing that week is batch week, right? But, realistically, We all put things in our calendar months out at a time and in advance.
And so when you put batch week on the calendar, it may conflict with some things. And so this is another moment of giving yourself grace and saying for the next few months, I may just do less during batch week. I may put out less content than I normally do as long as I’m showing up consistently and then after a few months go by because Once you have Batch Week on your calendar, you’re going to protect it, you’ll get to a point where Batch Week will just be Batch Week because you don’t have previous commitments already on that calendar.
And so I wish I had gone back and done that and given myself that grace to finish out. Okay, here’s what Batch Week is going to look like. These few are going to be a little chaotic. I need to cut back, right? That’s really what I needed to do. I needed to cut back on how much I was trying to do, I needed to give myself grace, and I needed to schedule out batch week, or reschedule, in my case, for the rest of the year.
The final thing that I wish I had done is I wish I had cut my losses. And by that I mean, so what I was essentially trying to do for every batch week is I was trying to finish up the content for the current month that never got created and also batch out the next month’s content. And I wish what I had done and said instead was just cut my losses for the current month, been inconsistent, just let it go, and then only focused on creating content for the next month.
That way I was able. Once I did this I was able to finally go, okay, I’ve created all the content for the next month I’m just not gonna be consistent for the rest of this month. That’s okay. It is what it is I’m gonna cut my losses and now I’m back on my batch week schedule instead of essentially trying to fit in two batch weeks into one or even less than one batch week because of the way that life was going so Those are the things that I wish I had done sooner than I finally did in order to get back off of the content creation hamster wheel and back onto my batch week schedule, but I wish I’d done them sooner, so I wanted to share that with you.
The other two options, if you just really cannot get off of that content creation hamster wheel, again, cutting back, cutting back permanently on how much you’re doing, is something you can do and then you can also hire help. You can hire people who are going to help take some of it off your plate and then be able to do less moving forward.
So those are two other options if you’re like, I really just cannot get off of this hamster wheel. I, I wasn’t on it and now I’m back on it and I just can’t find my way back off. Those are two things that you can also do. So here’s your action step. Put batch week on your calendar. for the rest of the year.
And if it’s already on there, reschedule it. Go in and give yourself grace to move things around. Maybe you need to make a change. If you’re in content batching bootcamp, I highly recommend that you go back in and watch the lessons about creating your own batch week schedule. And redo it. Re evaluate where you are in your life and business so that you can reschedule that batch week.
I had to change mine completely. I used to do Monday to Thursday for batch week and I’ve had to now start my batch week on Thursdays instead because of my new schedule and so I wouldn’t have known to do that if I hadn’t taken the step back to re evaluate, is what I’m currently doing working? Obviously it’s not, so what do I need to change?
So that’s your action step for this week, and then your book recommendation is The Lost Summers of Newport by Beatrice Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White. I can’t get enough of what these women write. If you like historical fiction, you will love this book. This one is set in a couple different time periods, which is really fun, and they overlap and I just highly recommend I will link to it in the show notes so you can check it out if you’d like.
And until next time, I hope you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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