Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Crafting a curated list of content ideas

Whether working on a blog, a YouTube channel, or another social-creative endeavor, managing your content can require some regular effort.

This week, holliseaster shares a simple method for how to keep a steady pipeline of new ideas without too much extra work: capturing new ideas, preparing them, and scheduling them.

I write about a lot of topics: suicide prevention, mental health, productivity, music, education, instructional design, and more.

I’m always coming up with new topics for writing or making videos, and it seems like I get five or six new ideas each time I write. Because I have my irons in a lot of fires, it can be hard to keep track of what I want to write next–do I want to do another post talking about suicide intervention, or is it time for something about optimizing our daily habits to prevent small irritations and worries?

I use RTM for tracking all these topics within a list I call “ps-Write”. Whenever I have an idea for a blog topic, I add a task, calling it “Blog: whatever”. This is quick and painless, and I can do it in seconds, even from my phone.

When I come back to my computer, I’ll check through the list and see if there are any that I want to mark as:

high priority (needing/wanting to be written soon)
#wait (meaning that I can’t write it until I hear back from someone else)
#na (for Next Action, a Getting Things Done-style tag that tells me which articles are ready to write without further preparation.

I can then search for any of those tags, use them in Smart Lists, or whatever. I started off with #blog and #video tags, but I found that I preferred having ideas visually sorted in the list, so I switched to the “Blog: write about using RTM for idea tracking #na” model.

So here’s an example ideas list:

Blog: interview with KBE #wait
Blog: lean optimization and automation
Blog: understanding by design book review
Blog: write about using RTM for idea tracking #na
Email: send recruiting email to professors !1 #na
Email: write to JK about conference collaboration
Video: how to tune a guitar without an electronic tuner

It works really well for me. Whenever I’m feeling ready to write but not sure where to start, I open up my ps-Write list and scan through the topics I’ve stashed away. Usually, something feels compelling, and I’m off and running!

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.