A recap of my roundtable presentation at atlsummit 2022

My journey with content creation

Like so many others, 2020 gave me an opportunity to share something I love with the world, just when everyone was tuning in online to listen.

I still remember posting my first Youtube video, staying up all night to perfect each cut, sync the audio, find open source music that didn’t sound like 100 synthetic recorders, and just generally stumble through turning my love for a hobby into an entire public persona and platform.

But let me back up before we go too far down memory lane.

My name is Lauren Robinson-Ladouceur and I’m a full-time content creator based here in NYC. Today, I’m going to talk about a different model for content creation that goes against a model that I – and many other content creatores. And I’ll share how I’ve deployed this model to beat burnout and free up more time for the work I really love doing. And how maybe you can, too.

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When 2020 came around and millions of new content consumers came online, there was this huge influx of attention. By focusing on serving my community with planning and organizational tips I was able to grow, with hard-won but loyal followers. And as my account grew, naturally – the amount of work increased at the same rate.I started that Youtube channel I was talking about earlier – planning, writing, filming, editing and publishing each video, 3 times a week.

But to a certain extent, you get attached to something – and I loved the feeling of growth. And it seemed straightforward – do what the algorithms say, and you’ll grow. This required constantly producing new content Then you monetize with ad revenue and seek out partnerships. Maybe you think about starting a course to scale your business, or you are looking for clients, - whatever it is — It’s an extremely delicate balance. And when you’re a small business owner, all of these decisions are very consequential and emotional and complex and difficult, all at once.

Creating content felt like being on a treadmill - and that feeling of being out of control.

So in documenting what needed to change, what I even could change, I mapped out the entire content creation process – a chart from idea to asset, all the steps that went into producing a piece of content. And looking at that flow chart I’m like – OK, this is actually pretty efficient. I’m delegating as much as I can. I don’t know how to make this process better. So what am I missing here?

And I realized that I was missing the forest for the trees, so to speak:

There’s a popular system a lot of creators use called content batching. It’s where you plan, write, edit, film, photograph – do all of the prep and staging work for an entire month’s worth of content in advance.

• I discovered content batching pretty early while I was still scaling.
• The efficiency nut in me said – OH yeah, this system is perfect – let’s implement it right now. And without a second thought, I did. The process looks a little like this:
• I’d sit down in about a week’s time - so mid-October, to plan out all of November’s content. There’s this huge ideation piece where you have to think – what’s going to be relevant to my audience in November?
  • So for me, let’s say about 50 pieces of content across Instagram, TikTok and Youtube.
  • There’s a guessing game taking what you know now and applying those trends and knowledge, hoping it will still be relevant 6 weeks from now when you finally publish your Black Friday post, right?
  • After you ideate, you have to flesh out the creative vision. For Tiktoks and Reels, what sounds / music do you want to pull in?
  • For Youtube, it’s writing scripts and creating a shot list for B roll
  • Then you edit. And then it sits.

Except the problem with content batching is that it was stifling creativity and totally overwhelming to implement. Content batching thinks of content in a very specific way. It requires you to map current trends and their ideas today, look forward, and then create from scratch.

• It also requires getting into a flow state in your work, where you can focus for hours on end just on content creation. I have ADHD, so this is just…it’s impossible for me.
• It was also taking me away from my life for one weekend a month, just fully disconnecting from the world to focus on content.

To borrow a metaphor – imagine you’re an artist, content batching is like creating a painting from a blank canvas. Now imagine you’re doing that like…25 times a month. Now, content creation isn’t comparable to art in this way, but that’s the type of creative muscle you’re building. That mental model is helpful when I think about content batching – you’re creating something from nothing but ideas.

There’s another form of art that is made differently, however. Sculpting, which is made when you’re chipping away at a whole piece of metal or stone to create something. And that’s the model we can use to beat burnout.