Producing content at speed: Lessons from COVID-19

As the worldwide pandemic brought little NZ to a halt, I, like most other marketers hunkered down in my newly created “home office”. (Aka the kitchen table or occasionally the ironing board which masqueraded as my standing desk).

What I learnt at that kitchen table, was some valuable lessons on content creation.

The pressures that everyone was under, the need to produce, adapt and get new solutions to market led to some interesting observations.

I want to concentrate particularly on content creation here, since that's my wheelhouse.

I’ve read many a times, that the act of writing every single day is one of the best ways to hone your content creation skills.

Great advice I thought, then “that sounds too hard, I don’t have time” and promptly ignored.

Well it turns out it’s true.

As strange as it sounds, while the workload almost doubled, we were able to produce faster than ever.

Rather than having a week or month to launch we might have a day, or even hours.

We were creating and releasing global updates every single day – and I found this tight time frame actually made things easier.

I started seeing inspiration everywhere – ideas for our next global piece out on walks, runs, while out spotting teddy bears in windows… We quickly had a backlog of content to last through lockdown. I found I could produce and write faster than I ever had before.

As Mark Twain once said, “deadlines are the greatest source of inspiration.”

So now as the pace (slightly) starts to return to BAU, the question arises – how to we maintain some of these lessons?

How can we create artificial deadlines and the same sense of urgency during lockdown to continue to create faster.

Perhaps this rapid fire pace isn’t sustainable long term and there needs to be ebbs and flows?

But one thing is certain, I’m new fan of the deadline.