How to Create Content From Your Daily Work

This week, somebody asked me why I do not think PDFs work as well anymore and what I would use instead.

That question became a video. I did not hold an idea session or ask a machine for one hundred topics. I noticed something that had already happened in the work.

Content is created by doing the work. The extra job is paying attention.

Start with the live question

A real question gives you the reader's language and the gap in their understanding. Save the wording while it is fresh, then record the answer you gave and the part that still needs evidence.

The same week might contain an offer you are rebuilding, a connection-request pattern that surprised you or a handoff that failed. Each event already carries a problem, a judgement and a possible lesson.

Capture five lines

Write what happened, who it matters to, what you think it means, what evidence exists and what remains uncertain. That takes long enough to preserve the idea and not long enough to interrupt delivery.

Do not turn a client call into a content shoot. The work comes first. The capture only needs to let you recover the thought later.

Find the decision and the artefact

Questions give you language. Decisions give you a point of view. Artefacts show how the work actually happened. Run any substantial claim through the five-part proof receipt before the source becomes several published formats.

Save the checklist, message, page, workflow or before-and-after draft when privacy allows. The artefact stops the finished piece becoming another tidy lecture written from a safe distance.

Protect the client before the story

Useful specificity can identify somebody faster than expected. Remove names and revealing combinations unless permission is explicit.

When anonymising the story destroys the evidence, teach the method without the story. A vivid post is not worth spending somebody else's trust.

Review the work once a week

Sort the captured notes by relevance, evidence, distinctness and fit with the work you want more of. Discard anything that needs an invented lesson to become interesting.

The blank page becomes less frightening because the topic already happened. More importantly, the finished content sounds inhabited because the judgement came from somewhere real.