May 7, 2023 3 min read

Building My Sawmill: Rethinking My Approach to Content Production

Originally, creating content for me was about marketing my work to a new audience in the midst of the pandemic. I wanted to connect with people that were interested in the same subjects and even find clients that might hire me.

However, over time it's become pretty overwhelming to manage a blog, newsletter, youtube channel and twitter. That's a whole lot of places to publish to! Although I'm producing a lot of things these days, I don't feel like I've got my process quite nailed yet. In a week I could create a blog post about generative art, a video about Github Copilot and then try to find something to tweet about.

I discovered first hand that the act of repurposing anything I produce is worthwhile. My 'One Does Not Simply pip install' post for example has racked up most of the traffic to my blog in the past couple of months - despite it originally being the concept behind an underperforming video I made a couple of months ago.

Repurpose your content:

- 50% of the views on my blog this year have come from an article about Python package managers I published in February. Thats 5.2k views total.
- The same rant as a YouTube video published a week earlier has yielded just 295 views. pic.twitter.com/JhJHSoXAhu
— Ian Wootten (@iwootten) April 18, 2023

Many have written about selling your sawdust - byproducts created from what you're already doing. For me, writing or recording a video about something I've learned or already know is akin to that. But, I don't want to only be making sawdust, I want to be building a sawmill too. Sawdust was never meant to be the endgame, just a byproduct of my work.

How do I get there? I'm not sure. Planning things, being more deliberate about what I'm creating probably would go a long way. The main thing is probably to concede to doing less, focusing on quality over quantity, and ensuring that everything I create aligns with my overall goals.

I hope you've found my thoughts useful. If you've faced similar challenges in content creation I'd love to hear tips that have worked for you. As always, if you have any comments on this issue or suggestions for the future, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian