Time Management for Busy Content Creators – The InTakeCreate Podcast

In this episode of the InTakeCreate Podcast, we go through healthier ways that we can approach time management for content creators.

With 4 kids, a full time job, and a general lack of focus – this time management can be vary hard. Thankfully, with a healthy creator mindset and a bit of patience I’ve been able to fall into a creative pace that I really enjoy. I’m always working on something, but that something isn’t working me over in the process.

There are a ton of time management tips out there for content creators, but unfortunately too many of them push an unhealthy “hustle” that not all content creators can maintain.

In our growing effort to inspire more content creators to approach the industry with mental clarity – these time management tips for content creators acts as an inside look at what I mean when I start preaching about healthy mindsets in creators.

Watch on YouTube

Comment below, or tag us on Twitter – Share your time management tips for content creators!

Want to listen to the previous episode? “The Unhealthy Content Creator Hustle”

Transcript

Welcome to the InTakeCreate Podcast. A podcast helping aspiring and experienced creators, think differently about productivity and their content as a whole.

We’ve touched on today’s topic a couple of times where I tried to preach this whole content creation but without an unhealthy hustle idea. 

Time Management for Busy Content Creators

And today, I actually wanted to talk about my time management. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on Twitter, you can follow me on Twitter at intake, underscore Anthony (Link Here). But I’ve gotten a lot of questions there about how I actually manage to find time for content creation. When I have four kids, all of which are under nine, I have a full-time job nine to five Monday to Friday.

Usually longer than that. It can be pretty demanding and just I, I’m like we’re balancing six schedules. We have busy lives. All of us have busy lives. Babies are just. You know, what babies do… They demand all of the time and that’s not a bad thing, but a lot of creators can get into a really bad funk and kind of a bad attitude about their content creation. 

Because it seems like a burden at that point. So today, these time management tips, I’m going to talk about the way that I approach content creation. So that it doesn’t become a burden or so that it doesn’t stress me out and my goals stay my goals through it. 

Your Mental and Physical Health

So very first, the most important tip I can give every single creator and really every single person no matter what you’re trying to do – your mental and physical health comes first above anything else. Whenever I’m not focusing on my mental health and my physical health, I’m not operating with the right amount of clarity in my life without that clarity, I’m not creative either. 

There’s no good creativity coming out of me when I’m just lost in stress and despair, more importantly than my creativity, I’m not being a good partner or parent. If I’m lost in that stress and despair and down in a bad mental health funk. 

If I’m ignoring that and just trying to force out some content, the content’s gonna be worse, I’m gonna have a bad attitude about it, and it’s not gonna be worth it. So my very first priority needs to be taking care of my mental, and physical health. So, how do I do that? 

Tools to Increase Mental Clarity

There’s certainly some lots of tools that I have at my disposal to work on those things. For instance, I started therapy last year. I’m not going to it now on a regular basis but I had a really powerful good stint in it last year and I’ve carried out some tools from that to really help. 

I have practices like a mindfulness and a meditation practice, I have regular long walks, I have regular reflection practices, a regular journal, practice, all of these things to make sure I’m paying attention to my mental health, paying attention to what kind of mindset that I’m in. And making sure that I take the time to make it a focus. 

So by taking into time to meditate by taking a walk, by taking the time to journal for a while. That forces, my emotions and my mental health to become the focus for that moment. 

So find the tools that kind of work for you, everybody’s different, I highly recommend therapy to everybody. Even if you don’t think you have depression therapy, can really help you sort out some of these confusing signals that we’ve started to send ourselves over the years. So mental and physical health comes first. 

Get Comfortable With Short Form

But then, tip number two is to get used to short form content. If your schedule is busy. So for me, like I said, very demanding, full-time job, very demanding house, with four kids, things get crazy. Sometimes the only creative work I can push out in a day is four minutes of scrawling down in my journal, something? 

If all I’m gonna get is four minutes in the day or just a few minutes to offload at night or a few minutes in the morning to pick out a few things. Long form content is not going to be my best friend at that point. What I need to do instead is find a short form content to work on. 

So for me, that’s Twitter, really right now he’s blurbs that I tweet out these threads, that I tweet out. These can all be worked on, conceptualized and designed in really short periods of time. And if I have a longer time, they can be bulked. But if all I have is five minutes. 

Just jotting down a few thoughts, on an idea that could be tweets, is way more productive than trying to squeeze one more paragraph into a five thousand word post or trying to edit a photo for some big concept and that doesn’t work when all I’m gonna have is a few minutes and maybe not even with a computer. 

So getting used to short form content is really important if you’re going to be a busy creator. 

Schedule Your Long Form Content (Creating AND Publishing)

But you can’t leave behind long form content. So my third tip is to have your pillar long form content, but schedule its creation into your schedule. So my short form content, gets squeezed into these few odds and ends where I have the time to do it. 

My long-form content is scheduled in. So my recording of this podcast and my editing of this podcast is scheduled into my lunch breaks. It’s on my calendar. So I see it. My longer blog posts that I write those are I have it scheduled in to write those in the mornings to wake up early and hammer it out or to stay up a little bit after bedtimes and hammer it out, these things are scheduled in because if I leave long form content up to finding time they will never ever be time in my schedule. 

Recap the 3 Points

I have I’ve said this before. I have to purposely build the time for this content or else they will never ever be the time for it. So those are the three tips. I shared them in a thread on Twitter recently and they were received well. So, it’s mental, mental and physical health comes first. 

Get used to short form schedule year long form, but obviously there’s a caveat here with all of my time management and productivity tips. It’s that I’m not perfect. None of us are perfect balancing life especially with six schedules, is just not easy. So I think everybody, if you want to be a content creator, just do it absorb all the productivity tips, they’re super, super helpful, all these routines, and systems, and apps. 

They’re amazingly powerful. And they help but our health needs a lot more than hustle and a good app. Our health needs to be a focus no matter what kind of content or create. If we’re not making health the focus, we won’t have the consistency to stay in this game. 

Outro

So, that’s all I’m gonna share today. I hope these three tips. Help you sort of get into a different mindset when it comes to time management because a lot of these content creator tips can just be go-go. Why aren’t you spending more time doing this? You like it. We feel obligated to pour ourselves into this. 

And then we sort of forget that this is a fun hobby and content creation, should be fun. I get that. A lot of us are trying to build careers out of it. I’m trying to build a career out of it as well but I don’t want to sacrifice my entire life. 

I don’t want to in sacrifice, the way I treat my family, I don’t want to sacrifice my current full-time job in the sake of creating content. I want that to stay a fun process for me. And the only way to do that, for me right now is to follow three tips that I went over today. 

I hope that helps. If you find those interesting share this podcast, with a friend of yours, it helps, get it in front of more people. I’m having a good time experimenting with this podcast. And speaking of experiments, if you’re listening to this in August of 2021, I’m doing a 30 day, WordPress.com blogging challenge experiment where I’m taking the 30 days. 

About an Ongoing Experiment

I’m starting a new completely free wordpress blog and I just want to show people that blogging has such a low barrier. Eventry that. If it’s something you want to do, you don’t need to be scared off by all these hosting tips, or expensive routes to get there and all these, like, full speed productivity tips sometimes, someone just wants to start blogging, to express themselves to think about their thoughts, to create something. 

And those people should have a guide to follow through on how to actually do that without just getting hammered with affiliate links to different hosts. And and then it just becomes too much of a commitment to people who just want to express themselves. So, follow along on Twitter, I’m gonna be posting updates. 

Hopefully, every day of just how I’m approaching this free SEO focused block, so that’s kind of fun. That’s what I have going on right now. You can follow all this stuff at intake underscore Anthony on Twitter. That’s where I do all of my contact creation experiments. And if you’re just want to focus on tips and helpful guides for content creators, you can follow intake underscore create and visit intakecreate.com. 

Thank you for listening. Go make something.