Publishing schedule

What a publishing schedule is

A publishing schedule is one decision, written down: how often something new appears, in which channel, on which day of the week. Weekly. Fortnightly. One piece a month and one newsletter. That is the whole document, and it is usually a page.

It is not a list of pieces. The dated list of specific pieces is a content calendar, and it cannot be built until the cadence is settled, because the cadence decides how many rows the calendar is allowed to have. The schedule comes first. The calendar fills it in.

It is one chapter of the content strategy plan, sold on its own for the many businesses whose only real problem is that they promised themselves more than they can do.

When you need one

You need one if you have stopped and restarted more than once. The pattern is always the same: a good month, a busier month, a gap, a guilty burst, then silence. Nothing about that is a writing problem. It is an arithmetic problem, and it is fixed by counting first and promising second.

You also need one before hiring anybody to write for you, because the cadence is what you are buying. Agreeing a monthly retainer without agreeing a realistic pace is how both sides end up disappointed in month three.

You do not need this if you already know your pace and keep it. In that case the next useful thing is the dated plan of what actually goes out, which is the calendar, or deciding the order of the backlog, which is prioritisation.

How the cadence is worked out

• Hours counted, not estimated. Who can write, who can review, who can publish, and how many hours a week each genuinely has once their real job is accounted for. This number decides everything after it.
• The true cost of one piece. Drafting is rarely the expensive part. Deciding the subject, finding the facts, waiting for review and loading it into the site usually cost more than the writing, and all of it gets counted.
• The slowest step. Cadence is set by the bottleneck, which is almost always one busy person who has to approve things. A weekly pace behind a reviewer who reads on Fridays is not a weekly pace.
• A margin. Whatever the arithmetic allows, the promise is set below it. A schedule with no slack in it fails on the first bad fortnight, and a failed schedule is abandoned rather than adjusted.
• The rule for a bad week. What to do when a slot cannot be met: move it, shorten it, or skip it. Agreed in advance, so nobody has to decide it while feeling behind.

What you get

The schedule. One page: the cadence per channel, the fixed days, the named owner of each step, and the agreed time limit on review.

The arithmetic behind it. A short working that shows how the number was reached, so that when somebody asks for twice as much you can show them what would have to come off the list.

A fallback pace. The slower cadence you drop to in a genuinely busy quarter, decided now, so that the choice is between two schedules rather than between a schedule and nothing.

A worked example

An illustration. A four-person accounting practice wants a weekly article and a monthly newsletter. Counting the hours: one partner will write, and has perhaps two hours a week between January and March, and rather more in the summer. Nobody else writes. Review is the same partner, so there is no queue but there is no cover either.

Two hours a week does not produce a weekly article. It produces one good piece every three weeks, and in tax season it produces none. The schedule says: one piece a month, published on the second Tuesday, drafted in the preceding week; the newsletter every second month, built from what has already been published; and nothing at all in February and March, planned that way on purpose and made up with a double run in July. The practice has published for two years on that schedule without missing, which no weekly promise would have survived.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish now, what you promised yourself, and where it stopped. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope and number agreed before anything starts.
3. The hours conversation. Forty minutes with each person who touches content, counting honestly. This is the part people skip, and it is the only part that matters.
4. The arithmetic and a draft schedule. Two to three working days. Usually it is slower than anyone hoped, and that conversation is had properly rather than glossed over.
5. The final page, agreed with the people who have to keep it, not just the person who signs it off.

About a week from first call to an agreed schedule.

What it costs

This is a small fixed-price piece of work, quoted after the half-hour call once I know how many people and channels are involved. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, so you can see where this sits relative to a full plan or a monthly arrangement. The number is agreed in writing before anything starts.

It is also included, without a separate charge, in every content strategy plan and in the first month of any ongoing work, because nothing else can be promised sensibly until it exists.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The cadence gets filled with dated pieces, which is the content calendar. The list of things waiting gets put in order, which is content prioritisation. Or, if the honest number turns out to be lower than the business needs, somebody else takes on part of the work through managed production.

None of those is assumed. A publishing schedule is complete on its own: one page, agreed, and it will do its job even if you never commission anything else.