Introduction
**Ready to Ditch the Clutter?**
Ever feel buried under a mountain of repetitive tasks?
What if I told you there’s an easier way?
Join us for a fast-paced episode of **Content Universe** with Mikkel Svårt, the mastermind behind Montanus. Mikkel’s back from a refreshing summer break in Denmark, and he’s got a mission—eliminating five major workflow headaches.
We’re talking task duplication, version control chaos, messy file management, scattered team chats, and those overly complex content templates. Sounds familiar?
Mikkel’s journey is all about cutting the clutter for a smoother, more innovative workflow.
If you’re a CMO, head of content, or leading any brand team, this episode is packed with actionable tips that will transform your processes.
Don’t miss out! Tune in and get ready to turn small tweaks into big wins for your business!
What You’ll Learn
• How to eliminate redundant tasks and boost productivity.
• Smart file management tips for large video and text files.
• Avoid communication chaos: Streamline your internal discussions.
• Unlock the power of consistent template usage in content creation.
• Simplify version tracking for efficient content development.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Hello and welcome to the Content Universe. Today I really want to talk about something that’s been on my mind for at least a couple of days or maybe even weeks. It’s just been the summer holiday here in Denmark… and in Denmark we’re fortunate to have a long summer holiday which of course leaves a lot of room for thinking. Okay, so I’ve been thinking. I really need to clean up. I need to clean up my processes and this is what I’m going to talk to you about today. My name is M��given Svårt and I have the content agency Montanus where we produce podcasts, blog posts, video stuff, social media stuff… all that kind of things for knowledge-driven companies. Now today I want to go through… One, two, three, four, five different things that I think I need to clean up in my processes to make my work more value based or have less no value tasks and to minimize redundancy and of course to just be a little bit leaner this year than I was last year, than we were last year. Okay so like I said I have five different things that that I think so the first one that I’m really experiencing to quite a large degree and I’ve been sitting baffling with this for a couple of days now is redundancy of tasks. So when we produce a piece of content there’s actually quite a lot of tasks or there there are some That we do over and over and over again because of… well for different reasons so one of them is when we deliver say social media content for a client what we will first do is we will go produce that social media content so we will go into Canva that most often is in Canva if we do like graphics stuff so to go into Canva we’ll create the graphics stuff and we will then export the graphics and then we will import those graphics into a PowerPoint presentation that we can then later on send to the client. Inside that PowerPoint presentation we also have the text that goes along with that piece of content. Now this is already two steps for you know showing the client or showing our client the same task, so it’s already a redundancy of one because we could have also just written that status text that goes along with the post, written that inside of Canva and then have invited our client into Canva to comment inside Canva instead. But instead we chose, back in the days we chose to do it via PowerPoint. Now that’s just number two step and and when we then have the feedback from the client, what is happening next is that we will have to take it from or not from PowerPoint, but we will then have to put it up on a platform that we use called Social B, where we manage all the content for our clients and for ourselves. So that is again a step where we will have to basically take that same content and just move it. We’re not adding any value, we’re just moving it from one place to another place and again inside Social B we also do have the opportunity to actually invite our clients in and then have them comment and correct and feedback whatever and have them do all that inside of Social B. So we have like three steps that are not value-adding at all in delivering to our clients. So that i think is just a waste of time and that’s one of the things that we need to get rid of this year. To kind of see if we can cut down on these redundant tasks. Now another thing that I’ve been thinking about is duplets and version history of our files. So back in the days we established a system where every time we create a new version of a piece of content so that could be a blog post, so every time we will create a new version first version that will be the first draft it will be called v1 as like a prefix of the title of the file. And then when we get feedback either from ourselves, so internal feedback or if we get feedback from externals, we will then create a new file and call that with a comma or with a dot. So it will be v1.1 That means this contains feedback that needs to be cleared and then when the writer is then implementing the feedback they will again create a new file that will become v2, and so on. And sometimes of course if we have a lot of iterations those versions they can go all the way up to like I think I’ve tried like version 12, usually it’s just like one or two versions that it’s been out with our clients but just the internal back and forth and trying different things out story-wise, it just has an impact on the version history. And having that many versions, that again is a kind of a layer of complexity that has become a little bit dull after the introduction of Microsoft what’s it called 360 365 because what has included now is that Microsoft, whenever we are working inside a file it automatically saves the file and it also automatically logs the version history so right now we are actually doing quite a lot of remembering to save it in different file forms, different files, names and blah blah all this we actually doing quite a lot of that and it does take time and the same of course is I would say the problem here is just amplified when we’re not talking strictly text files like a word document but when we’re talking video stuff having all of these different versions lying around that we don’t actually end up using is well it’s a waste of time and effort but also and I think this is kind of important actually is also waste of digital space so it’s a waste of gigabytes and when you’re dealing with video all of you guys out there dealing with a lot of having redundant video files is really a waste of quite expensive storage so that should of course be avoided so I think that is something that we are going to to deal with is kind of like minimize the the duplets and the version histories and all this minimize that quite a lot and then that kind of segues right into the third thing that I’ve identified that we need to work with and that is file management and of course they’re all interconnected what I’ve just talked about but for us file management means we have some files that are raw files you have some files that are work that are being worked on and all those files live inside our internal working space both on our project management system but also on SharePoint and then once they’re done they move over into our client facing server side so so we will then both have the duplets because we will both have the files inside of or our of our working space so to say or a working area and we will also have them in our in the client facing area and that takes up a lot of storage which is bad because it’s expensive but it’s also moving files from one place to another place moving them back again if we have feedback remembering to update the version names and all of this moving files back and forward it seems like a small thing but when those files are sometimes a hundred and fifty gigabytes or even more having to upload that onto your servers having to download it again through from the servers and doing that loop more than once it’s really just a waste of time and it’s just not a really it’s just not a very lean process. So that is something that we will be looking at how can we minimize the file management to kind of have a more lean strategy to that and of course while still maintaining like backup versions and all this that we need of course to have a safe production. Okay! So those are like file related stuff and and the redundancy of tasks so doing the same task in different versions and more over and over again and having the duplets and version history and then file management itself. Those are the three first ones and then we kind of move into another category of redundant and and and non value-adding work and that is redundant communication. And I think one of the most important things inside an organization small or large is of course communication. Without communication there is no organization. But I think it’s very important to be very aware of centralizing the communication where it is needed so a year ago or so we actually did the transition from having.. we had a slack Slack channel or a lot of Slack channels where.. but our Slack account we would have all the on every client we have and then sometimes you find that I find that we also you know some communication might be also in an email and then will actually have to re-communicate that inside of Slack and now what we basically discovered was that inside of project management system click up you also have the opportunity to have to you know have comments on different tasks and to kind of have a mini or like a sort of a chat but more like a comment section on each task that we have so what I found was that all of a sudden we were actually updating things what what is happening on each task we were updating that inside of Slack first and then we would more or less duplicate that into click up to the specific task or sometimes it will be inside of click up because it would be a comment on a task and sometimes the communication would be over in Slack which basically just became that one big mess where you know if you had to find that you had to find go back and find whatever comment it was you would have to look at both platforms or even three platforms if you if we were so unfortunate to have mail included as well which is like the worst but what we did was we actually it was kind of an experiment so what we did was we closed down our Slack account completely and then took all of the communication inside of our project management system because what I realized was that 90% of all the communication that we had was on task specific things so that should actually live that communication should actually live on the task itself rather than in like a like a common a common room kind of Slack Channel, however it also turns out it also became clear after having that setup with only click up a communication no Slack it also kind of became clear to me that that’s really not quite enough because those last 10% or maybe even a bit more of communication that is not task-related where does that live and it was just a really hard thing to to find a place where it could live and suddenly we began to write on you know Facebook Messenger or you know text messages or even calling or all of this, you know there’s anything wrong with calling but you’re kind of have to report it down, to record it down into a text-based thing afterwards right. So what we’ve done now is we’ve reopened our Slack account but what I can also see after doing that is that we really need to restructure our Slack account because before it was based on all of the clients so we basically had one slack channel for each client and I really think that I will delete that… that’s just my kids in the background if you can hear a bit of noise… but I think I’ll delete, I’ll probably delete all of the accounts, the channels that are client phasing and then more have like you know banter and random stuff and general messages, quick questions, all of it like have those kinds of channels I haven’t figured out the structure yet but but I will be looking into this to avoid this redundancy in communication and this confusion of where is where are things. Okay so that is a communication thing and then the last thing that I realized would make our job or our, or not our job but our processes a lot leaner and a lot, I would also say raise the quality of our stuff, of our products, is to be a little bit harder on our templates. So what I mean by that, I mean when we create content we use templates. But right now we have a bunch of templates but from project to project we vary those kinds of templates quite a lot. So it’s actually quite different what we deliver from say one month to another month for the same client. Those two deliverables, so those two packages of content, they can be quite different. And well first of all it’s a lot of extra work for us and second of all I don’t think it’s, it’s also a lot of extra work for the client because they then get, they have to kind of reconsider the whole content package again every month. And then thirdly I don’t think it creates any more value for neither our client nor their customers. Or the people who we are communicating to. Because the last link in that chain, the end users of the content, or the target audience, those people, they only see a fragment of what we are producing. And also for those guys it is nice to consume content where it’s easy to see and too easy to recognize the style of content. It’s basically like when you that’s also why you start watching a series on Netflix is because it’s nice to know what you get. It should be new content but you know if Game of Thrones suddenly introduced what what he called Walter from Breaking Bad or it’s just in it was suddenly became you know it’s not the same universe or it’s it’s filmed in a completely different way, that will just basically confuse the consumer, the target audience of that series. And I think the is actually true for for company content, I think the same exact thing is true. So all in all I think, after giving it a lot of thought over the summer, what we will be using a bit of time on in the coming months or two or three maybe, is to kind of get rid of the redundant tasks. We will get rid of our version tracking at least in the style that it is right now, we will minimize the file management as much as we can, and then we will do something to our communication so we have clearer lines on what communication belongs where so we don’t have the redundancy there. And then of course we will then try and also be a little bit harder on using those templates and delivering a consistent and and what’s it called.. basically delivering the same kinds of content every time.. now it sounds like we.. it’s not the same kind but, I think they’re just really quite different, even though they’re the same! I don’t know if you get that, but does that make sense at all?! Anyway let me know in the comment if that’s completely bollocks. Anyway I think from here right now is clean up if you set up your processes.. that is what i’m telling myself.. to create a leaner and of course more profitable but also more quality.. better quality.. more security of quality in.. in the work that we do. I think that is.. that’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed guys.. let me know in the comments or send me an email on podcast at montanas.co. I’d really love to hear from you! If you send an email to podcast at montanas.co.. now it says it again.. it’s a little trick there.. I will be at the other end of that so it’s not like you get an answer from some kind of bot or.. or.. or some kind of support function it.. is me Mikkel.. I’ll be there.. I’ll.. it’ll go right into my inbox. So, so just hit me up with an email! I would love to hear from you! If you have any topics.. anything that you think would be really cool or maybe if you are like.. hey guys, I know something that I want to share within this kind of content universe space, maybe we should.. yeah look each other up and maybe do like a double.. double interview, what’s it called? An interview style episode.. It could be fun.. alright.. that’s it for now! You know.. subscribe.. like.. share with your friends and colleagues.. all that! You know.. you know the whole thing I would love.. I would really love it! Thank you, thank you so much! Okay.. see you next time.. in the Content Universe!
