The Content System I Run on Thirty Minutes a Day

A daily publishing habit sounds expensive until you systematize it. My current content workflow takes about thirty minutes a day and produces a publishable article. Here is the exact system and where the time actually goes, down to the minute.

The Four-Step Flow

1. Harvest a topic from yesterday's client work (2 min)
2. Draft an outline by hand (5 min)
3. Expand to full body with agent assistance (15 min)
4. Human edit for voice and accuracy (8 min)

Why the Outline Is Hand-Made

Asking an agent to outline produces generic structure. Asking it to expand your outline produces your voice. The difference is huge. Never skip the hand outline. Five minutes of thinking about structure saves thirty minutes of rewriting later.

The Expand Step

I give the agent the outline, my voice sample (three recent articles), and a target word count. It returns a draft that is 70 percent there. The remaining 30 percent is the edit pass that makes it sound like me rather than sound like an AI trying to sound like me.

The Edit Pass Is Non-Negotiable

Edit checks:
- Voice: does it sound like me?
- Claims: is every assertion defensible?
- Links: do external links resolve?
- Length: is it in the 400-800 range?
- Structure: is there at least one list or code block?

Skipping this pass is how you end up with articles that drift into generic AI-sounding text. The edit pass is where the voice comes from. It is the non-delegable part of the workflow.

The Publishing Gate

An article that fails any edit check does not ship. I would rather miss a day than publish slop. The habit is daily. The gate protects the quality. Two missed days in the last eight months. Both were sick days. Neither hurt the library.

The Compounding Part

Over a year, 30 minutes a day is 182 hours. That is four standard work weeks. For a permanent content library with SEO compounding, it is the cheapest marketing investment I make. Compared to ad spend or conference attendance, the ROI is not close.

The Template I Would Sell

Every client I talk to asks how I do this. The answer is boring: hand outline, agent expand, human edit, ship every day. The system is not special. The consistency is.