Market Core · Content Calendar · Module
The plan
What is scheduled, when, and by whom — far enough ahead that production has time, close enough that it can respond to what is happening.
The idea
How it works
A plan fixed six months out is a plan that will be wrong and followed anyway. A plan fixed two weeks out is a plan production cannot resource. The workable arrangement is firm near-term and provisional beyond.
Every slot needs a name against it. A plan with themes and no owners is a list of intentions, and the intentions are met by whoever has time, which is nobody in a busy month.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Roll the horizon
Firm for the next few weeks, provisional for the quarter, themes only beyond. Re-firm as it approaches.
- 02
Name an owner per slot
Not a team. The person who will produce it.
- 03
Leave reactive slots deliberately
A fully booked calendar cannot respond to anything, and the ability to respond is worth a slot a month.
- 04
Plan against production time, not publish dates
Working backwards from the publish date is what makes the plan achievable.
One level in
The components of the plan
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
A fully booked calendar cannot respond to anything. Leave a slot a month unassigned on purpose.
The other modules in content calendar
The cadence
How often the organisation publishes, per channel and per format, set at a level it can hold through a difficult quarter rather than at its best month.
LearnSeasonal moments
The fixed points in the year worth planning around, identified from the audience’s calendar rather than from the organisation’s.
LearnCapacity
How much the organisation can actually produce, approve and publish — with the buffer that lets the schedule survive an ordinary disruption.
Learn