Create Editorial Calendars With Open Source Tools

Here are a just a few types of written deliverables:

• Blog posts
• Marketing pages
• Technical playbooks
• Strategy proposals
• Ebooks
• Technical documentation
• Presentations
• Speeches
• White papers
• Video scripts
• Performance reviews
• Reports

And there are many more. While each of these documents will contain different types of content, they are uniform with regard to the kind of labor required to complete them.

For all of these documents there will be similar process: research, outline, drafting, editing, and publishing. And you will likely travel between those initial stages until the moment of publication.

Having a solid editorial calendar allows you to track when these items are due as well as allocate the necessary resources to complete them on time.

In the course of preparing documents, or blog posts, or some kind of written work, you have probably noticed that the steps are always the same. They usually follow a similar procedure: research, outlining, drafting, back to outlining, drafting, more drafting, review, editing, review, and finally ending off with the completion of a final draft.

Most of the project planning software on the market today dictates how you should run your processes. For example, if you are trying to schedule out a blog post you create the post as a task object with subtasks that mimic the process laid out above.

The problem you’ll soon find is that you’re getting deeply frustrated, because the writing process is not linear.

Also, you have another blog post coming up behind the one you’re currently working on, and you have various administrative tasks to do—like SEO reviews, analytics reporting, and so forth.

You need to separate your written deliverables from the discretionary, administrative tasks you do on a day to day basis. (The exception would be administrative tasks that have due dates.)

This division of labor can be best achieved by treating your written deliverables as events rather than tasks. And that means they go on a calendar rather a task tracker.

Here’s the difference:

• Calendar events are non-negotiable; they happen on a certain day, and the date is fixed; thus, you can use time as a variable to prioritize your work toward hitting the due date
• Discretionary tasks can be worked when you have the available time and bandwidth

But how to prioritize the ongoing work associated with the written deliverables and the discretionary tasks? Your calendar will tell you. Time is a variable.

If you look out over the next few weeks and see you have a written deliverable coming up soon, you also see exactly how much time you have left to finish it. This means you can look at your day’s schedule and know intuitively how many hours you need to dedicate to the written deliverables and the discretionary tasks.

You may be wondering, “Well, I have this calendar full of upcoming blog posts. What about actual appointments like meetings and business-related events.”

Most calendar applications, including GNU Evolution, let you create different “calendars” for different events. For example, you could have a calendar just for written documents and a separate calendar for meetings and business-related events.

This way, if you want to see upcoming business events, excluding written deliverables, just include and exclude calendars as needed.