How to plan a month of posts in one sitting

Nobody abandons an account because they ran out of ideas. They abandon it because at half past nine at night the question "what do I post" is a decision, and a decision at half past nine is a decision not to post. Batching removes the decision, not the work.

The rotation that fills a month

Four kinds of post, repeated weekly, is enough for any small business account. Each does a different job, and the mix is what stops a feed reading as either a catalogue or a diary:

1. 1Show the work. The thing you made, the room you treat in, the before and after. This is the post that gets saved.
2. 2Answer a question you are asked every week. Aftercare, how long it takes, what to bring, whether it hurts. This is the post that gets sent to a friend.
3. 3Say what you think. A short opinion with a reason attached — why you stopped offering something, what most people get wrong. This is the post that gets a reply.
4. 4Ask for the booking. Once a week, plainly, with what to do next. This is the post that pays for the other three.

The sitting itself

1. 1Write thirty captions first, in one document, without touching an image. Captions are the slow part and doing them together is what makes them fast.
2. 2Photograph in one go: everything you need for the month in one session, on one day, in the same light.
3. 3Lay the month out in a grid — a spreadsheet, a planner page, anything with a row per day — so you can see two weeks of the same kind of post before it goes out.
4. 4Build the images last, from templates, so nothing needs designing at the point of posting.
5. 5Schedule what can be scheduled, and leave three slots empty for whatever actually happens that month.

Why the empty slots matter

A fully scheduled month reads as an absent account. The three loose slots are where the real thing goes — the customer's message you were allowed to share, the delivery that arrived, the day everything went wrong. A feed of thirty planned posts and three unplanned ones looks alive; thirty-three planned ones do not.

Repeat what worked, on purpose

Keep the month's plan after it runs, with a note beside each post: saved, shared, ignored, booked. Next month starts from that list rather than from nothing, and by the third month you are repeating the shapes that work rather than inventing thirty new ones every time.