A month of social content takes about three hours if you do it in one block and never mix two kinds of work in the same stage. Spread across a month it takes far longer, because you pay the setup cost every time.
Here is the block: nine stages of 20 minutes each. Use a timer. The timer is not a productivity gimmick, it is what stops stage 2 eating stage 5.
Before you start
Have three things open, or the session becomes a strategy session:
- Your content pillars and their target shares
- Your posting schedule (which days, which channels, how many slots)
- Last month’s report, or at least the five posts that did best
Decide the number of posts first. For most accounts a month is 12 to 20 posts per primary channel, not 30. Fill 75% of your slots and leave the rest for reactive posts.
The three-hour block
| Stage | Minutes | What you do | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0–20 | Review last month | Five things to repeat, three to stop |
| 2 | 20–40 | Dump raw material | An unsorted list |
| 3 | 40–60 | Pick and assign pillars | A numbered list with pillar tags |
| 4 | 60–80 | Map to the calendar | Every post has a date and a channel |
| 5 | 80–100 | Break: away from the screen | A working brain |
| 6 | 100–120 | Write every first line | One hook per post |
| 7 | 120–150 | Write every body (2 stages) | Full drafts |
| 8 | 150–170 | Media pass | Every post has its asset |
| 9 | 170–180 | Load, spread times, read in order | A scheduled month |
That is 180 minutes including the break. Stage 7 is the one that gets two slots, because writing is genuinely the longest stage and pretending otherwise is why plans overrun.
Stage 1 (20 min): review last month
Open the numbers before you open a blank page. Write two short lists: five things worth repeating, three things to stop. Look at format, topic and timing, in that order.
The output you actually need is a rough count of what to repeat. If carousels did the work last month, this month should have more of them. Our engagement rate calculator is useful here if your platform’s own number and your scheduler’s number disagree.
Stage 2 (20 min): dump
Everything, unsorted, unjudged: customer questions, support tickets, photos on your phone, a competitor post that annoyed you, three things you learned this month, an old post worth rewriting.
Do not evaluate. Evaluating during collection is why this stage runs to 45 minutes for most people.
Add seasonal hooks from a holiday calendar at the end of the stage, not the start, so the month is not built entirely around dates.
Stage 3 (20 min): pick and assign
Cut the dump down to your post count. Tag each survivor with a pillar and a format.
Then count the pillars. This is the stage people skip and the reason accounts drift into 70% promotion. If your strategy says a pillar should be a quarter of posts and it is currently one post out of sixteen, fix it now, while fixing it costs two minutes.
Stage 4 (20 min): map to the calendar
Every post gets a date, a time and a channel. Work in your actual posting schedule, not an idealised one.
Two checks before you move on: no more than two posts of the same pillar consecutively, and the highest-effort posts land on the days you will actually have time to finish them.
Stage 5 (20 min): break
Not optional. Stages 6 and 7 are the only creative stages in the block, and they are considerably worse if you go into them cold from three stages of sorting. Leave the screen.
Stage 6 (20 min): first lines only
Write the opening line of every post, in one sitting, in one document. Nothing else.
This is the highest-value 20 minutes of the block. Every platform truncates, so the first line decides whether anything else gets read, and writing them consecutively means you can see when six of them start the same way.
Stage 7 (40 min): bodies
Now fill them in. Drafting only, no editing while you write. When all of them are drafted, do a single editing pass over the whole set, reading them consecutively. That pass is where you cut the repetition that is invisible post by post.
If a body will not come after two minutes, mark it and move on. One stuck post should not cost you the stage.
Stage 8 (20 min): media
Every image and video in one pass. Pull, crop, name, done. Do not go looking for an image mid-draft in stage 7, since that is exactly the context switch this whole method exists to avoid.
Posts with no suitable asset become text posts or get cut. They do not become a task for next week.
Stage 9 (10 min): load and schedule
Load the whole month at once, spread the times, then read the queue in order as a reader would see it.
The read-in-order check is quick and catches things nothing else does: two posts saying the same thing eight days apart, three product posts in a row, a seasonal post scheduled after the season.
Where the three hours goes wrong
Stage 2 overruns. Almost always, and always because of evaluating while collecting. The timer is the fix.
Stage 9 takes 40 minutes instead of 10. This is a tooling problem, not a discipline problem. Adding 16 posts one at a time through a single-post composer takes about two minutes each.
No break. Stages 6 and 7 done tired produce a month of drafts you rewrite anyway.
Filling every slot. A full calendar has no room for anything that happens during the month. Leave a quarter of it empty.
Planning a month you cannot produce. If stage 7 consistently overruns, your monthly post count is too high. Lower it rather than shortening the writing.
Loading the month in ten minutes
Stage 9 is the only stage where the tool matters, and it is where most of the overrun happens.
The short path: keep stages 6 to 8 in a spreadsheet with a column for the post text and a column for the date, export it, and import the lot. BulkPublish’s bulk composer takes that CSV or a pasted block, turns it into an editable list, and lets you set channels across the whole batch before overriding individual posts. Times can be spread across your existing queue slots instead of typed 16 times, and the calendar is where the read-in-order check happens.
- Posts: Free: 3/day. Pro: 30/day. Business: unlimited.
The limit is per day, so a month of 20 posts spread across 30 days sits well inside it.
The short version
Three hours, nine stages of 20 minutes, one timer. Review, dump, pick, map, break, first lines, bodies, media, load. Never mix two stages. Decide the post count before you start and fill only three quarters of your slots. Do the media in one pass at the end. Read the queue in order before you close it.