It took me 3 years of stopping and starting to learn this.
This week I posted content on LinkedIn, Substack, X, and YouTube.
A few years ago, I didn’t even know where to start.
As I sat in my chair, responding to a few comments on LinkedIn, looking at my chat on Substack, and seeing analytics on YouTube, I stopped to ask, “how did this come about?”
Then in my YouTube video feed, I scrolled all the way down and realized I had started sharing three years ago, then stopped. For three years, I had a podcast idea I never launched. The same thing with my writing. I joined Sustack in 2019. I wrote one post and didn’t write anything again until 2023.
That’s three years of ideas that never reached anyone. An audience I could have been building. Three years of growth I could have fostered.
In all three cases, it wasn’t because I didn’t know what to say.
The real issue is that I never put it in the calendar.
Consistency is not a strategy problem. It’s a scheduling issue.
The reason your content keeps stopping
You’re not getting in front of the right people because your schedule is all jacked up.
When I launched my first podcast, eleven years ago, in business school, I did everything on the fly — reaching out to whoever I could, recording on my phone, spending hours editing, posting to SoundCloud. It worked for a few months. Then I stopped.
It worked. For a few months, until I couldn’t sustain it.
I tried a second time, a few years later. Same result. I started then I stopped.
When I was starting up this new podcast I was more prepared. This time, I recorded 20 episodes before launching the first one. There was a deadline – my next book, dropping Fall 2026. That constraint forced the schedule. And the schedule made it happen. It gave me 20+ hours of material that I can share to build more trust and visibility about things I care about.
The most challenging part was not the ideas of the episode. It was getting people to talk to me. Getting on people’s busy schedules.
It took 5 months of requesting, following up, scheduling, and re-scheduling.
But this doesn’t only happen when you’re scheduling with others.
I was busy too.
And if you don’t schedule in time, it is difficult to have a sustained practice of building trust for your business and career.
I see this with practices that are a lot of times solitary too. For instance, writing and doing sales.
They both require a lot of work done in the backend, during alone time. Drafting, researching, creating lists, editing emails, editing chapters, sending it out to your audience. And if you are working solo, there is no one to keep you accountable but yourself.
You just need to force yourself to sit down and get it done.
You need to schedule the time to do it.
Without a schedule, you wait for inspiration, share only when you think it’s ready, and go in different directions when content and deals dry up. You then have to rely on external performance to keep the ball rolling. And when you stop, the burnout completely kills momentum.
For years, I had thought about starting a podcast again. Halting my first podcast attempt put such a bad taste in my mouth that I didn’t want to do it again.
Inertia is real.
Your brain defaults to whatever it’s already doing. A schedule is how you override it.
But you have to know what to schedule. That’s the work that requires your full attention but no one directs you to do – the writing, the recording, the deep thinking.
That’s where the compounding happens.
Schedule the part that no one sees (build for long-form, repurpose the short)
This is what I’ve been noticing on the practice ground: The people who show up consistently online don’t just get there by chance or virality. They build a system to support what they do.
Build a content schedule.
To stay consistent, I have one myself.
For writing that’s: Choose a topic to explore (mon), plan and structure(tues), draft the newsletter (wed), edit (thur), publish (sat), and repurpose to post over 7 days on LinkedIn/X.
For podcast: Get on the guest’s schedule, send preparation material, record the episode, edit, publish (every two weeks), and repurpose short clips of the episode over two weeks until the next episode.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Each step takes effort. There is no magic pill to make it happen in a snap of a finger.
Having a schedule makes that easy.
If you’re growing a business, showing up consistently online is important.
Instead of getting pulled by what’s on your feed, you can slow down and still show up consistently.
Here’s what I’d invite you to experiment with:
Start with the end: Where do you want to be? The more important question here is – where (which platform) are the people you want to get in front of?
Determine the format you enjoy: Know how you enjoy expressing yourself. Because for it to be sustainable, it has to be enjoyable. The first ever platform I was on was SoundCloud with my music. Then I started writing more and moved to LinkedIn/X/Substack. Start with one format you will enjoy – writing, audio, or video.
Have an idea capturing system: Keep a note of interesting things that happen in your business or life. Make this a 1-minute discipline at the end of the day to note down things. They will be seeds for when it’s time to develop your long-form content.
Schedule 15 minutes every day: Each morning, develop one idea a week into a long-form piece of content. This builds out a long-form version of an idea each week.
1 platform. 1 format. 1 system. 15 minutes a day.
You don’t have to become an influencer, but if you want to have more agency in your life and career, you have to do sales and marketing.
It doesn’t have to be influencer-style. You can go deep on the work that actually matters to you, develop ideas worth sharing, and build trusting relationships through visibility. You just have to schedule it to make it happen.
Closing Reflection:
I gained 1 subscriber on YouTube last week.
There’s nothing glamorous here. Next week it might be more, the week after I might lose subscribers. But I’m driven by the fact that I have a system to explore ideas that matter to me. The system compounds.
The system doesn’t care about the number. It just keeps running.
So here’s a question I have for you today: “What’s in your schedule today that you could replace with an idea or experience worth exploring?”
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. I work with a handful of entrepreneurs to align their go-to-market goals with the impact they want to make in the world. If that sounds like you, hit reply and say “let’s talk.”
