How I organize my work as a content creator
breaking down the systems, the automation, and the numbers
Over the years, as my job has evolved and changed, I’ve struggled to find good resources for managing some of these newer emerging work responsibilities — primarily as a content creator. My overall job is two sided: I have the Simplified side (including my work as Founder and CEO) and what I call the “Emily Ley” side (including my work as an author and content creator).
I’ve shared how we manage Simplified in posts here and here, but over the last year, I’ve been working on perfecting systems for managing everything I do as a content creator as well. This part of my job entails the following:
Writing here on Substack
Brand partnerships: when I partner with a brand like Boll & Branch to create content featuring their products.
Affiliate work: when I share products and services I love and receive a small commission for purchases I generate (including things like LTK and Amazon Associates).
I’m not including my work as an author in this post, because I manage those responsibilities a little differently. Considering just this “Emily Ley” bucket of revenue outlined above, the split is as follows (and I regard them in this same priority order): Substack 60%, brand partnerships 30%, affiliate work 10%. It varies from month to month, of course, but this is how it typically breaks down. This side of our business wasn’t always as substantial as it is now. Because of that growth, I’m able to focus real significant time on it — and it’s so much fun (so thank you for your support)!
Asana is my #1 tool for managing content creation. I do this in two projects (if you’re familiar with how Asana works, you know it’s a system that allows you to build out projects for different parts of your business or different projects you’re working on). We have projects for each book, projects for different sides of Simplified (operations, production, marketing), and two projects for content creation. I label them with the EL prefix so we know this is for this side of my job, not something Simplified related.
EL Content Calendar (brand partnerships, affiliate work)
EL Substack Calendar (Substack)
I manage these as two projects, rather than one because my brain works differently for social content vs. Substack.
The Content Calendar is more complex than Substack because each partnership has different requirements in terms of due dates, preview dates, deliverables, approval requirements, etc. As you can see below, each piece of each partnership—typically each piece is one post—makes up one row. And each of those aforementioned data points make up columns. The great part about Asana is that you can totally customize your workspace so that it works for you. Using some systems I know work well for us at Simplified, I built this “view” (below) from scratch (Asana has pre-built workspaces, but I like to make my own).