Introduction
In the chaotic world of content production, inefficiencies are like stealthy saboteurs.
Are your workflows feeling too fragmented?
Drowning in a sea of disjointed tasks?
You’re not alone! Many content pros in engineering and IT face this chaos.
But here’s the exciting part: in the latest episode of *Content Universe* with Mikkel Svold from Montanus, we’re flipping the script on traditional content planning!
Mikkel spills the secrets on transforming your fragmented workflow into a streamlined “production window” approach.
Imagine cutting down on task-switching, boosting concentration, and cranking out higher-quality outputs—all with consistent delivery!
Ready to elevate your content game?
Dive in to discover how this powerful shift can revolutionize your production process.
Listen now and kickstart your journey toward content efficiency!
What You’ll Learn
– Streamlining content production through efficient task assignment.
– Benefits of merging roles for project consistency.
– Eliminating fragmented tasks with overarching assignments.
– Maximizing productivity with focused “production windows.”
– Importance of leadership in managing production expectations.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Hello and welcome to the Content Universe. Today I want to talk about something that means quite a bit when we are planning our production of different kinds of content. My name is Mikkel Svold. For those of you who don’t know me, I run Montanus, where we produce podcasts, we produce blog posts, social media posts, video stuff, all that jazz! All kinds of content for high knowledge engineering IT companies. Those kind of people. I want to talk to you today about how we structure our production setup or actually it’s not the set of itself! It’s rather the way that we structure the planning of the production because that’s actually changed quite a bit over the last year or two. Now, before just to give you an overview no, you know I want to start somewhere else, I want to start by kind of giving you an idea of what it is that our production flow kind of looks like what we do for our clients is that first we start out by having this kind of brainstorming session where we decide on which topic are we going to attack from now and then a year ahead maybe half a year ahead depending on the frequency of content they want produced and then we do we have an interview and we have a production and we have that every month running so that could be maybe if they want 12 episodes per year we would have 12 interviews per year spread out throughout the year and then we would basically deliver the content in batches so every piece of content or every content batch that matches a certain interview will be delivered together now that’s pretty straightforward and doing this for ourselves doing it for our clients obviously kind of adds to complexity because sometimes we have three or four recording sessions but they are only to be produced or published that is through you know over the next kind of couple of months, four months something like that. What we actually use to do and and we are actually still in this transition but what we used to do was we would we would basically have different people sitting with different tasks so we would have one videographer, we would have someone doing the sound editing we would have someone doing the the show notes for the podcast that could be the blog posts, someone doing that we would maybe have someone specialized in social media doing that and we would have a kind of a network of freelancers helping out and then a couple of people in-house as well. Now what I really found was that this is a super ineffective way of producing content and that is because it is so fragmented, so there’s so much communicating back and forth there’s so much feedbacking to one, feedbacking to another, waiting for for the feedback to be implemented, implementing the feedback all of this it just creates such a complex network of things that you’d have to do, that it swarmed our calendars with minuscule or like tiny tasks that, oh you know, you have a quarter of an hour here where you have to give feedback on this and that or you have one hour here where you have to write a five blog post, not blog post but five social media post for this and that client and the calendar just got super fragmented and that just led to a lot of wasted time, a lot of task swapping and yeah just general confusion I would say. And what we’ve now chosen to kind of work in the in the direction of, it’s kind of hard to still do 100% but we are pushing for that direction is to limit the number of people that we’re working with as much as we can so instead of having one writing a blog for a client and another one writing the social media post for that same client, we would have the same person do those two things. That makes a lot of sense to most of you I’m pretty sure but just that simple maneuver just really eases the the coordination quite a bit on how we can push through content. And another thing that we are now pushing to is, instead of having small tasks so every single little task described in our project management system, we would then instead have more overarching tasks, so that can be, instead of having, write blog, no, I keep saying blog post I mean social media post. So write social media post 1, write social media post 2, write social media post 3. Instead of having that we would then just have, write social media posts and then it will be up to the person sitting there, first of all, deciding on how many social media posts can this interview become, that’s one task. But also of course looking into the contracts, looking into the agreement with a client and looking okay, are we aiming for 10 posts or are we aiming for 3 posts? Because that of course, has an impact on how much that we should produce. And instead of having all of those small tasks, we would then have a bigger task saying okay, you need to do the social media posts. Or we could actually do it, we could take it one step up, and we could say you’d have to do all the text deliverables for this client. And that includes the blog post, that includes the social media post, it might actually also include the email marketing. So all of that we could actually jot into one big task saying this is your time blocking for all the text deliverables. And then just have us like a real quick checklist just to make sure that we of course remember everything. But having, but doing it that way. Instead of having all this fragmented stuff, cleans up first of all, it cleans up our project management system quite a bit. So that is actually a really good thing, because it just makes it so much easier to find out what is the task that you want to work on now. And also, it kind of pushes for something that I’m really eager to share with you. It pushes for a concept I call, or is called I think many people call it, the production window. So instead of having a lot of different tasks where people can kind of choose, of course within the deadline book, but people can kind of choose when they want to do it. I would rather have the whole team working on one specific project for a specific number of days, and then that is the production window. So, we have maybe one week to finish all of the deliverables for this one client. And pushing for production windows makes it so much easier to plan everything, to not double book you your time, which is a big thing here at our place or it used to be as I said, it’s kind of a big thing, and we’re really still in the working process here. But, not over-booking, not double booking your time with tasks. So, just reserving that full week or even just a full day for one project only and then pushing as many deliverables through as possible in that specific time period. That is something that is really changing the way that we are working here. And that’s also what I really want to give you that idea that instead of trying to juggle many different tasks and you have project 1 project 2 or project 3 and they all need to be kind of done all that the same time, instead of doing them all at the same time, try and see if you can kind of push your content production setup. So you work in production windows where you say okay we concentrate deeply on this one specific project and then when that’s fully and done we can then go on to the next project. It may sound kind of well logical to some of you but I think a lot of content producers out there a lot of people involved in producing content in writing in designing and all this a lot of people they’re actually juggling many many different tasks all at once and if you’re a big team I would say it’s a leadership responsibility to push back when someone comes from outside your department from outside the marketing department saying hey we need this brochure done by Friday can you do this. That is a management responsibility to say I’m sorry guys you should have let us know two months ago or you should we should have known this you know two weeks ago even we can’t make that deadline but we can make it and this and then of course you can rearrange future production windows if you need to kind of reprioritize the way that you do stuff but putting things into production windows just really helps clean your calendars clean your project management system and in turn push out more constant content at a constant frequency and at a really obviously high quality. Because that’s the catch the quality raises if you are not task swapping too much because you can concentrate and you don’t have to refocus on what it is that you’re doing. Alright guys that is it for today’s Content Universe I hope you enjoyed it and if you did share it with your friends and colleagues and of give it a star review five stars if you’re really happy, four stars if you’re not so much and well give it one star if you think it’s completely crap and just a waste of time. And then if you do give it a one star or actually also if you do it give it a five star hit me up with an email you can find me at podcast@montanus.co and I’ll be at the other end of that of that wire phone so yeah hit me up and I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Alright, see you on the next planet in the Content Universe.
