---
title: 'Build a content creation workflow that ACTUALLY works '
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=4C3MH0A2Sn8'
video_id: '4C3MH0A2Sn8'
date: 2026-09-15
duration_sec: 786
channel: 'Jade Beason'
---

# Build a content creation workflow that ACTUALLY works 

> Source: [Build a content creation workflow that ACTUALLY works ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4C3MH0A2Sn8)

## Summary

This video provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to creating a personal content workflow that helps creators remain consistent and avoid burnout. The creator outlines six key steps: auditing your current process, defining content goals, building a pre-ideation system, mapping creative rhythm, designing workflow stages, and implementing a kill switch for off weeks. The approach emphasizes aligning the workflow with your specific goals and creative energy to ensure long-term sustainability.

### Key Points

- **Introduction: The Importance of a Workflow** [00:00] — Having a chaotic or inconsistent content creation process makes it hard to remain consistent. This video offers a step-by-step workflow to change your life as a creator.
- **Step 1: Audit Your Current Workflow** [00:15] — Break down everything you currently do to create content: how you ideate, prep, produce, and post. Write down each task to see the full picture.
- **Identify Friction Points** [01:32] — Ask yourself which tasks you procrastinate on, could do quicker, or have lowered quality on to make easier. Deep-dive into the 'why' behind the friction. Example: the creator procrastinates filming because they hate setting up their studio.
- **Bonus: Track Time Per Task** [03:26] — As an optional step, time how long each task takes. This awareness helps refine the workflow. Example: filming takes 13-45 minutes.
- **Step 2: Define Content Goals** [03:39] — Determine the purpose of your content (e.g., leads, brand awareness, authority, community engagement). This guides which part of your workflow to prioritize. For authority, research; for growth, ideation; for engagement, post-posting community interaction.
- **Step 3: Build a Pre-Ideation System** [05:23] — Overcome blank page syndrome with three tools: a headline dump (note on phone for spontaneous ideas), a swipe file (saved inspiration), and thought starters (record what sparks ideas). Also, schedule deliberate scroll time for research.
- **Step 4: Map Your Creative Rhythm** [07:33] — Identify the best times of day/week for creative work. The creator is a morning person; afternoons are 'dead zones'. If unsure, keep a log of how you feel filming at different times to spot patterns.
- **Step 5: Design Workflow Stages** [09:18] — Combine all previous insights into a project management system (e.g., Asana, Notion, Trello, Airtable). Use a status system for each idea (e.g., prepped, filmed, briefed, checked) to track progress clearly.
- **Step 6: Implement a 'Kill Switch'** [11:12] — Create a fallout plan for off weeks when you can't create. Use easily producible formats: Q&A videos, evergreen content saved for later, or repurposed/updated content.

## Transcript

If you have a chaotic or inconsistent process for creating content, I'm going to tell you right now, you're going to struggle to remain consistent and this whole content creator world is going to feel incredibly hard. In today's video, I'm going to give you your own workflow step by step that you
can distill and that is going to change your life when it comes to creating content. That much I can promise you. Let's just dive right in and kick off with step number one. Okay, so this first step involves you auditing your current workflow or your current content creation process. Don't stress
out if I say that and you're like, I don't really have a process yet. Don't worry, by the end of this video, you will have one. It's important that we do cover this first step though, which involves you breaking down everything that you currently do to create a piece of content. For example,
how do you come up with content ideas? How do you then prep those ideas? So like if you create carousels like this one, do you write down everything you want to include in the carousel before you design it? Or maybe you create short form video content like this one. Do you write
down what you're going to say before you film it. Or maybe you do vlog style content like this, in which case do you figure out what you're going to film before you go out and vlog your day. The next thing I want you to do is write down everything you do to produce that content. So
for example, to film this YouTube video, I sit down, I look at my notes and I film this video over the span of about 30 minutes. And then write down everything you do to post that content. So for example, for an Instagram post, you write your caption, you might even schedule your content in
advance. For YouTube, you would need to create a thumbnail, a title, write down all of the little things that you need to do in order to get that piece of content live. So now that you have that list, for reasons of pause this video, write the list and then unpause. Let's make this like a
work session, like a workshop, right? Now that you have that list of every single thing that you do, the next step is to identify any friction points. So I want you to ask yourself, are any of those tasks that you just wrote down, do you feel like you could do them a bit quicker, maybe a bit more
efficiently? Do you find yourself procrastinating with any of those tasks? Or maybe you've dropped the quality of some of those tasks in an effort to make things easier for you, right? Now we all procrastinate with some tasks. I'm going to really expose myself here and tell you what mine is. I
actually procrastinate with the filming part. So the bit that I'm doing right now, I normally procrastinate this part and I push it back on my schedule day after day. Now it's not enough for me just to admit that this is the task I procrastinate with and it's not enough for you just to identify
the task that you feel friction around. You then need to dive a bit deeper and figure out why you're procrastinating or why you saw some friction. For me personally, and this is going to make me sound so lazy, I hate setting up this studio. I hate it. I'll show you what my setup looks like right now.
Let me take my, let me take a quick photo. This is very messy of me. Okay, so I've got a photo on the screen of what I'm currently looking at. And to you, you're probably thinking it doesn't even look that hard. But when you spend four years dragging out your tripod, putting up your lighting,
putting up your mic, and then taking it all down immediately after, just to do the same thing a couple days later, it is so frustrating. I've identified that that's a friction point for me and fortunately in the near future I should be moving and that will allow me to have my own
dedicated filming space where I can leave all of this kit up and that's going to massively help me when it comes to how often I procrastinate actually filming. You might relate to that, you might not, but that's a good example of how I've identified an issue in my workflow and how
I'm going to rectify it. A bit of a bonus tip here for anyone who wants to be like a real A-star student Do we sort of say A because haven they changed the grades for kids now and now kids are graded on a scale of like 1 to 10 you guys will know what I mean when I say A though right it a good grade in case you weren sure so if you really want to be like an A star student take this one step further and actually break down
how long you spend doing each of those tasks so for example previously I said that I spend about 13 to 45 minutes filming every single video writing that down and being aware of how long it takes you to do each task will help you complete the rest of your steps and create
an amazing content workflow. Step number two is to define your content goals. This is a step that is slept on. I promise you most people who are trying to create a workflow that works for them do not do this step and it is an imperative, imperative part of the process. I want you to
ask yourself what is the purpose of your content? Why are you creating content? What is it that you're trying to achieve? For example, maybe you're creating content because you run a business and you're trying to get leads for your business. Maybe you're creating content because you're trying to grow and get awareness so that you can work with brands. Maybe you're creating content
so that you can show that you're authority within your niche. Maybe you're creating content because you want to build an engaged community. Defining what your goals are makes it easier for you to ensure that the workflow you're creating aligns with those goals. This is the reason why this
step is so important because if you don't consider what your goals are when you're creating your workflow, you very much end up with a workflow that isn't helping you reach your goals, in which case what's the point of creating it, right? For example, if you decided that you're creating content because you want to be seen as an authority within your needs, then when you're
designing your workflow, you need to make sure that you're leaving sufficient amount of time to prep for your videos, right? If you're showing educational content, you need to make sure that your videos are well researched. On the other hand, if you're creating content where you're trying to get awareness and you're trying to grow, then actually you probably need to spend more time on the ideation part
of your workflow because you need to come up with ideas that are trending and that are more likely to get you views and maybe even go viral. On the flip side, if you are trying to create content for the purpose of engagement, right? So you're trying to build and engage communities.
And actually, the part of the workflow that you need to focus on is everything you do after you post your content. So hanging out in the comment section and bonding with your audience over there. Like, that's going to be the most important part of the workflow. Do you see what I mean? So figure out what your goals are and then identify the part of your workflow that is going to be most important to you to allow you to reach those goals.
Okay, so step number three is to build a pre-ideation system. This sounds so much more fun than it actually is. It's basically creating a bit of a system to set yourself up for success when it comes to sitting down and coming up with ideas for your content. There's a few different things that you can do here to make that process easier for you.
Because a lot of us will suffer from blank page syndrome. You know when you like sit down to come up with ideas and then you tell yourself like, okay, be creative and then obviously nothing comes to mind because no one can be creative on the spot. That's the problem we're trying to solve. Okay, so you want to create one or all of these three things to help you come over that blank page syndrome.
The first we're calling a headline dump. This is basically when you write down every single idea that pops into your head whenever it pops into your head. I always talk about the importance of having like an ideation bank or like a note saved on your phone that you can access when you're on the go.
Because most of us come up with our best ideas when we're not trying to be creative. So it's like when we're on the train or like walking our dog, for example. That is why we need to have a note available for us to drop down all of those headlines or to dump all of those headlines.
Now that I say that, I kind of regret calling it headline dumps. But regardless, it still works. The next thing you want to create is a swipe file This is basically when you have screenshots or when you save different content ideas that you like Remember we are not about imitating these content ideas We about gaining inspiration from these content ideas The last thing you want is a list of thought starters So maybe it that a random topic comes into your
mind. Maybe you're having a conversation with a friend and they mention something that sparks an idea for you. Write down what it is that they said that sparked the idea. So rather than writing down the end idea, we're writing down what the inspiration was. This will hopefully allow you to
revisit that moment of inspiration and get more ideas for your content. Bit of a pro tip here. I I mean, it's not a pro tip because that's pretty easy and something to do. Maybe just a unique tip. Schedule scroll time in your calendar. Schedule 15 to 30 minutes of time where you are just scrolling through creators who have
similar audiences to you, looking through their content and purely doing it for research purposes. That's the key there. I'm not saying spend 30 minutes just scrolling anything that you want to scroll, which is the risk that we take when we open up any social media app.
Instead, it's about being really deliberate with the content that we're scrolling through. We're trying to look for creators who have similar audiences to ours, and we're just trying to learn what they're creating to connect with their audiences. I'll say it before and I'll say it again.
It's about inspiration, not imitation. Next up, this one's my favorite. Map out your creative rhythm. I love this one. This is basically when we figure out when the best time of the day is for you to actually
get this work done. Identifying this in advance is going to set you up for success in the future because a lot of us are struggling to create content simply because we are forcing ourselves to create at a time where we are just not feeling like showing up and being on camera. I talked
onto this early on and honestly it's one of the main reasons why I've been able to be consistent for so many years. I noticed very early on in my journey that if I try to get myself to do anything in the afternoon or evening it is not going to happen. I'm not going to film in the afternoon,
I'm not going to film in the evening, I'm not even going to come up with creative content or ideas or even prep anything in the evenings or afternoons. It's not going to happen. Those are dead zones for me. I need to film and create in the morning because I am one of those very annoying morning people, that is when I have the most energy. I mean, right now it's like 7am. I've already
gotten up, done my makeup and I'm filming. So I want you to identify when you feel the most creative, when you feel the most energetic, because that is usually going to be when you're going to want to do majority of the tasks required to create content. If you're really
struggling to do this, then I have a tip for you. Keep a log of how you feel when you are filming at different times of day. So if you're like, I actually don't know if I ebb and flow that much, I don't know if there's that much of a drastic difference, then film and create
at different points of the day and just keep a very short notebook logging how you feel. When you do this for a few weeks and review it, you'll be able to see that there's a pattern and that there'll be specific times of the day or maybe even times of the week. Maybe it's the start of the week when you feel the most creative and energized.
But you'll be able to identify a pattern and you can use that to schedule your production and your filming days in the future. Okay, step number five involves us bringing a lot of the previous steps together. This is all about designing your workflow stages.
So now we're taking into account what times of the week we are best suited to create, what time of the day we're best suited to create. We've identified every single step involved in our content creation workflow and we've also identified any friction areas and hopefully taken some steps to remove that friction.
In addition to this, we've identified our content goals and therefore which part of our workflow is the most important and we've figured out a way to consistently have some good creative ideas on the go. So I want you to bring all of this together and I want you to insert it into some kind of project management system I am not precious about which one you use although I do use Asana I put a screen recording up so you can see what my Asana looks like
It's color-coded. It has all the different channels that I create content on. It has the ideas. It has when it's going live. And I absolutely love Asana. However, I do use Asana to run all of my business.
I have my teammates on Asana. I mean, I even use Asana to plan my wedding. And the reason why I'm telling you this is because Asana is a really powerful tool if you want to use it to plan an entire business and do several other things. It might not be the right choice if you're literally only using it as a content calendar.
Other platforms that creators absolutely love include Notion, Trello, and Airtable. Those are also great options. The most important thing is that whichever platform you use, you're using it as a project board. My biggest tip is to log down all of the different content ideas that you have
and within each of those ideas, create a way for you to mark the status, okay? The status should align with your workflow. Say, for example, for me, when I have an idea for a YouTube video, I'll put it in my content calendar.
And then when I've gotten around to prepping for that video, I will mark that video idea as prepped. When I've gotten around to filming for that video, I will mark that video idea as filmed. When I've gotten around to briefing my editor on the video, I'll mark it as brief.
When I've had it back and I've checked it, I'll mark it as checked. When I've uploaded the video onto YouTube and created the thumbnail, I will mark that down too. That's the best way that I recommend that you use a product manager system. you lead with your content ideas and you just find a way to mark each stage of your workflow
within that to ensure that you're staying on top of everything and that all of your content is being created as efficiently as possible. Okay, the final, final step and again one of my absolute favorites is called implementing a kill switch. I love this step because I just think it sounds
dramatic because we've called it a kill switch. Basically what this step involves is building like a fallout plan for weeks that you simply can't create, right? Those weeks will come up. Do not fool yourself by thinking that you are never going to have an off week where you're not going to want to create.
It will happen, okay? And we need to plan for that. So the way in which we plan for that is by identifying some content formats that we can create without us having to film or do the whole ideation process, right? For example, Q&A videos, very easy for us to create.
You just whack a question box up on your stories and then sit down and answer what questions come through. The second type is evergreen content, especially when they're talking head videos like this one. This video itself is a great example of an evergreen piece of content.
This will be relevant for hopefully years and years to come. So I don't actually have to post this when I'm going to post it. I could just record this now, save it in my content bank for a rainy day, and use it when I'm having an off week and I don't have time to create.
Another common format type for this kill switch is repurposed content. So this is when you reshare an old video that you shared previously. Not something I recommend you do on Instagram because they're so hot on like original content now,
but it is something that still works on platforms like TikTok. Or maybe instead of simply reposting a big, back-to-date piece of content, you re-film it with a different spin, an updated version of it, and you release that as well so that you don't have to worry about the ideation process
because that's already been done for you. Okay, my loves, if you found any part of this video valuable, please hit the like button. I will take it as your token of appreciation. If you feel like hanging around, I recommend watching this video. It's all about how you can master storytelling
as a content creator. I'm very proud of this video. The feedback has been amazing and I think it's a really important video for anyone who creates content online to watch. Thank you so much for watching as always. I cannot wait to see you in my next video.